The Three Way Tavern: Selected Poems

Ko Un, the preeminent Korean poet of the twentieth century, embraces Buddhism with the versatility of a master Taoist sage. A beloved cultural figure who has helped shape contemporary Korean literature, Ko Un is also a novelist, literary critic, ex-monk, former dissident, and four-time political prisoner. His verse--vivid, unsettling, down-to-earth, and deeply moving--ranges from the short lyric to the vast epic and draws from a poetic reservoir filled with memories and experiences ranging over seventy years of South Korea's tumultuous history from the Japanese occupation to the Korean war to democracy. This collection, an essential sampling of his poems from the last decade of the twentieth century, offers in deft translation, as lively and demotic as the original, the off-beat humor, mystery, and mythic power of his work for a wide audience of English-speaking readers. It showcases the work of a man whom Allen Ginsberg has called "a magnificent poet, a combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian," who Gary Snyder has said is "a real-world poet!" who "outfoxes the Old Masters and the young poets both," and who Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described as "no doubt the greatest living Korean Zen poet today."

Table of Contents:
Contents Foreword Gary Snyder Introduction Clare You FROM Song of Tomorrow (1992) Today Song of That Day Front of a Tree The Woman of Kageo Island Arirang Grand Dame Choi Kumja Strange Land Cold Mountain First Memorial Night Song of Innocence Kangaroo A Boat My Resume The Cow Is Laughing You and I A Slice of Old Moon Sosan Granny Confucius, One Day FROM The Road Ahead (1993) Majung Village Ignorant Man Empty Field Memories My Spring After Stacking the Chopped Pines The Poem in Last Night's Dream In the Woods Mother's Dew Chirping of a Cricket A Cup of Green Tea Grandfather's Advice The Road Ahead FROM A Cenotaph (1997) My Poems Forgetting Going Over Ssari Hill By the Window Sumano Pagoda Fallacy The Poet Poems of the Peninsula Hometown Once there was a teacher more than eighty years old A Cenotaph Anapurna Lullaby The Voice of Baekdam Monastery Alone One Day About the Time Crepe Myrtles Bloomed Lion Self-Portrait Spring News Sadness The Winter Sky Breeze Salmon Back Home Passing through a Mountain Village The Croaking of Frogs At Buan Gomso After a Hangover But Empty Hands FROM Ten Thousand Lives (1986 -- ) Traveler January Full Moon Morning Rooster Women of Sunjeri The Street Kids Byong'ogi Mansooni, Comfort Woman Letters Aunt Uncle Jaemoon A Good Day Planting Rice Mountain Well Mitsukoshi Department Store Lark Kasame Salt Flats Sudong's Swallows Ch'ilyong'i Chungdu's Mother Ttaoggi Tavern Justice Three-Headed Eagle YH Kim Kyungsook FROM Ko Un's Son Poems: What? (1991) Echo Owl Baby Coming Down the Mountain Bushman Looking Back Drunkard Friend The Three Way Tavern Late Summer Tsetse Fly Moon Green Frog Held in Your Arms Cuckoo Way Winds Cheju's Reed Field Mosquito House Summer From A Cenotaph:Cheju Island FROM The Whisper (1998) Afterlife Suddenly Stars and Flowers Unlike Laozi You Confession Peace A Certain Song Meeting Myself Barley Field Mustard Flowers in April Early Spring Searching for the Cow Coda: The Thuja Fence Notes

About the Author :
Ko Un is author of Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems and The Sound of My Waves: Selected Poems of Ko Un as well as more than 100 volumes of poetry, short stories, fiction, criticism, essays, and children's literature, many of which have been best-sellers. His many awards include the Korean Literary Writers Award, Manhae Literary Award, and the Daesan Literary Award. Ko Un was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. Clare You, Chair, Center for Korean Studies, University of California, Berkeley, has received the Korean National Silver Medal of Culture, and is author of two language textbooks including College Korean. Richard Silberg, associate editor of Poetry Flash, is author of five books of poetry and the book of essays Reading the Sphere. You and Silberg have also co-translated the poems of Oh Sae-Young.

Review :
"Ko Un's work springs from a passionate dedication to the task of making whole again the narratives of the disrupted lives of Korea's people. No one has done more for what is coming gradually but ever more clearly to be recognized as Korea's literature of the twenty-first century." - David McCann, Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University "These poems have magic." - Willis Barnstone, author of Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho"