The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.