Your author spent two years in Peace Corps/Nepal, struggling to communicate with the kind and patient people among whom he found himself. The experience certainly conked on the head any lingering notion that the universe was populated by English-speaking life-forms. Life, being life, he came to wonder in wistful fashion what it would be like to live among rational beings? Not on this Earth, surely, but in the end found that he simply could not portray really rational men, no matter how far afield he flung his heroine. Verse which appears in Red Claudi is either of the author's own composition or his translation of poems written by the immense Urdu-speaking poet, Ghalib, or by that truly Renaissance man, Michaelangelo Buonarroti. A life-long affinity for fantasy, poetry and femininity (a natural combination, after all) gave rise to the question, which Red Claudi:The Everyday Poetry seeks to answer: what role would verse play in the daily life of a woman who finds herself cut off from all but her inner resources?

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• The Han Shan Poems on Sep. 14, 2010
  (no rating)
  I like these poems very much for the dry and self-aware personality they present--Han Shan. Whether he is author or subject, I feel that if I have not actually met a real person, at least I am seeing through less clouded eyes. It is not clear whether these are translations or original work on the part of Norton Hodges, a thing simple enough to state at the begining. However, if Han Shan or Norton Hodges produces another book, I would like to see it.