Selected Poems

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) is one of the forgotten figures of twentieth-century American poetry. After receiving a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, his work was published by several major U.S. publishers, but then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never left again, becoming a Japanese citizen in 1960 and from then on publishing almost exclusively in Japan. He taught at Doshisha University in Kyoto and became an afficionado of nō theatre and a great fan of Japanese pop music.In his sixty-year writing career he moved through several phases  in New York in the 1920s, he wrote short, finely cadenced lyrics ; by the 1940s he was producing substantial modernist works of great technical bravura ; after his arrival in Japan, he moved to a more anecdotal, often humorous mode. Yet, in spite of this stylistic odyssey, the voice in the poems is always recognisably his own. This Selected Poems reintroduces the work of an important and enjoyable poet, one who wrote equally well about urban life on Long Island and about the Japan he knew intimately during his forty-year residence there.