SOURCE: A review of Face at the Bottom of the World, and Other Poems, in Pacific Affairs, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, Fall 1970, pp. 481-82.

In the following review, Dunn offers a favorable review of Hagiwara's Face at the Bottom of the World, and Other Poems.

This book includes forty poems by Hagiwara (1886-1942), in an English version by Graeme Wilson, who also provides a short but enthusiastic introduction. I think it is true to say that Hagiwara's poems were characterized by a freshness of thought, and a clarity of description, in which language not greatly differing from the ordinary was used to write about things that were blinding by original, and sometimes shocking, at the time. The English versions appeal to me very much as poetical utterances (though I suspect that readers in their twenties might find them rather artificial), with some very telling collocations, and some fine effects...