A Great Valley Under the Stars

A Great Valley Under the Stars is the first book of poetry by Royall Tyler, the award-winning translator of The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, and other works of Japanese literature. Royall Tyler writes: Distilled from notes and pages written decades ago in the New Mexico desert and during Midwestern winters, this suite moves from listening for the voice of the worthless - trash, stones, men in the least of places - to a vision of a great valley under the stars, the spell of love, and the music of the sky. It is all one. Intimate and expansive, moving from a truckstop in the New Mexico desert to its counterpart in the world of the Japanese sacred, from intensely realised prose to prayerful poems of love, A Great Valley Under the Stars is a work of maturest reflection and consummate skill, a lifetime in the making, and worth the wait. (Andrew Fitzsimons) This is a delightful and lovely book - at once spare and lyrical, whimsical and profound. I have been grateful for Royall Tyler's splendid translations for years, but I am every bit as grateful now to have read him writing entirely in his own voice. (David Bentley Hart) Royall Tyler's poems, at once earthy and subtle, intensely responsive to all the world holds, far and near, resonate singly and together in the mind and heart: an act of magic. (Dianne Highbridge)