Coming from the country where short, concise poetry is celebrated, Hara Shiro's Ode to Stone is an unusually lengthy contribution to modern Japanese poetry. A recent winner of the Gendai Shijin Sho, this poem is regarded by some as having an epic quality that rivals some the great poetry of the twentieth-century West. The "narrator," stone, takes us to locations as diverse as Nagasaki, Paris, and Cairo, and to various times in history. It...