UTAMAKURA, ALLUSION, AND INTERTEXTUALITY IN TRADITIONAL JAPANESE POETRY by Edward Kamens

Yale University Press, 1997, First edition, 336 pp., 6 1/4" X 9 1/2", Hardcover Fine A central feature of traditional Japanese poetry (waka) is the use of utamakura―a category of poetic words, many of which are place-names or the names of features associated with them―to cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems and within the tradition. In this book Edward Kamens analyzes a wide selection of poems to show how utamakura came to wield special powers within Japanese poetry. He reveals how poets in generation after generation returned, either in person or in imagination, to these places and to poems about them to encounter again the forms, styles, and techniques of their forebears, and to discover ways to create new poems of their own.Kamens focuses especially on one figure, "the buried tree," which refers to fossilized wood associated in particular with an utamakura site, the Natori River, and is mentioned in poems that first appear in anthologies in the early tenth