Nirvana Days

A wish for inner calm runs through Cale Young Rice's verse, beginning with an invocation to winds blowing over the sea. In the title sequence, the speaker imagines visiting Yokohama, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and island shrines. Boats, temple bells, lanterns, gardens, and mountains give these imagined visits their shape, while thoughts of belief and freedom from desire connect the places with the speaker's search for peace.

Other poems turn toward the comfort of nature and the uncertainty of death. A shrine at Nikko becomes a setting for reflection on prayer, while trees, birds, and evening light prompt thoughts about sorrow and hope. The contents arrange the collection into non-dramatic and more dramatic verse, and the foreword identifies some poems as selections from earlier volumes. Readers drawn to religious questions expressed through landscape will find that the collection repeatedly brings distant views back to the life of the mind.