Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people's lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. In this book, all kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics, banquets and many others.

Brings together hundreds of poems by Japanese writers from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, with modern examples from Europe and America. This book is dominated by four great masters - Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki - who between them compress the gamut of human experience into the limits of seventeen syllables.