For Nirvana

In his Translator's Afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl describes his astonishing encounter with the poems in this collection-from dream encounter with the poet, to the poems, then the poet himself. Extraordinary workings of the three-line sijo form into the spaces of Zen practice, the poems call us to see! -- David McCann, Harvard University Reading these translations of Cho Oh-hyun's Zen sijo is like shining a light on a carefully cut, many-faceted stone. The poems are concentrated, understated, and effortlessly colloquial, both immediately accessible and, paradoxically, mysterious. The Zen nature of the poems' inquiries and observations-with their allusiveness and open-endedness-bear up under many readings, defying prized Western rationality and yielding a surprisingly rich range of tones, moods, and insights. -- Elizabeth Spires, poet and author of The Wave-Maker and Now the Green Blade Rises [Cho Oh-Hyun] has created a new tradition of Korean sijo poetry. -- Choi Yearn-hong The Korea Times While some of the poems embrace the kind of open-ended imagery commonly associated with Buddhist poetry, Cho innovates in this volume with narrative techniques that engage the senses and the imagination. World Literature Today