Description

The Records of Kosho the Toad was published in early 2018, only a couple months after the manuscript was accepted by the publisher. It’s a hard book to describe. As the title suggests, it does, in fact, feature a main character, who is a toad named Kosho—a Japanese name prominent in the history of Zen. And in many ways the poems in the book are Zen poems in which Kosho sits zazen (Zen meditation) and moves through places and scenes furnished with images, objects, and gestures common in monastic and lay Zen. There are also poems in which Kosho shows up and operates in environments associated with Christian practice. In some way or other, though, most of the poems take place in more familiar places that Kosho inhabits: house, garden, field, mountain, river, lake, surrounded by grasses, trees, fences, walls, open space.

The book is divided into two parts, each one of which represents a journey Kosho undertakes. In the first part, titled “The Short Trip,” Kosho moves progressively from familiar landscapes to unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable places. In the second part, titled “The Long Trip,” perhaps learning the wisdom contained in Hunter Thompson’s insight that “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” Kosho takes a step off the hundred-foot pole into a different kind of environment. Most of the poems in this second half are based on koans collected in the first half of the classic Chinese text, The Blue Cliff Record.