SOURCE: Face at the Bottom of the World, and Other Poems, in Poetry, CXVIII, No. 4, July 1971, pp. 234-38.

In the following review, Reeve offers a positive assessment of Hagiwara's Face at the Bottom of the World, and Other Poems and praises Graeme Wilson's translations of the poems in the collection.

Having no Japanese and not trusting Amy Lowell's What's o'Clock? or other Imagist imitations of Japanese style, such as Richard Aldington's:

One frosty night when the guns were still
I leaned against the trench
Making for myself hokku
Of the moon and flowers and of the snow

I hesitantly admire Graeme Wilson's translations of forty poems by Hagiwara Sakutarō. Although Hagiwara (1886-1942) was a sort of skeptical humanist who knew Baudelaire's work and who led a loose, drunken if not raunchy life, he seems to have overcome both the insipidity of early 20th-century Japanese culture and a prevailing...