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On the Royal Road

with Hiroshige on the Tokaido

James Bell author Hiroshige illustrator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Shearsman Books

Published:20th Aug '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

On the Royal Road cover

Long fascinated by Hiroshige's woodblock prints, and especially the famous Tokaido Road albums, James Bell worked for several years on an extended series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the second of Hiroshige's albums (1840-42), the famous Kyoka sequence in which each image contains a short comic poem. The sequence contains 56 images - one for each of the 53 stations, or stops, on the route from Edo to Kyoto, plus one for the starting point (Edo's Nihonbashi Bridge) and two for the terminus in Kyoto, the second of which is the Imperial Palace. This volume reunites James's wry poems with the images that inspired them, and includes an appendix of five further poems written to images from the first, so-called Great Tokaido album (1833-34), the work that made Hiroshige's name. A book for those who love poetry and also those who love art; those who love both will be doubly rewarded.

ISBN: 9781848617865

Dimensions: 203mm x 203mm x 10mm

Weight: 308g

138 pages