Shuntaro Tanikawa is the most inventive modern Japanese poet. Since his first book Two Billion Light Years of Solitude appeared in 1952, aged twenty-one, Tanikawa has contributed more to the development of a progressive post-War Japanese poetics than any other writer. His first Collected Poems, published in 1968, met both popular success and critical acclaim, distinguished for its refusal to compromise with the negative tones that dominated the poetic palette of contemporary Japan. Over the course of some sixty books of poetry, lyrics, prose-poems, narratives, epics and satires, Tanikawa's vitality has not waned; his work has remained experimental in form and theme, and widely read. This new selection supplements the original Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 1998, drawing on an additional eleven collections and incorporating a new editorial preface.

Shuntaro Tanikawa's sixty-odd collections of poems have received awards in England, China, Japan and the United States, including the 1988 American Book Award. He translated the Mother Goose Rhymes and, for several decades, the celebrated comic strip Peanuts. Having read at festivals on three continents and in numerous countries, Tanikawa has achieved a reputation as not only one of the most popular but also one of the most inventive Japanese poets of the modern age.