Kirjahaku

Paul Rossiter arrived in Japan in 1981, and during the next decade he rarely returned to Europe, instead setting out to see as much of East and South East Asia as he could. On Arrival gathers the writing that was one result of that curiosity. It includes poems from the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand, as well as one each from the USA and Australia, while the title section of the book consists of 'notebook poems' recording incidents, encounters and experiences during the first year of his life in Japan. In addition, some brief satirical pieces in the section titled 'Current Accounts' comment sharply on public affairs in 1989-1991: economic bubbles, perestroika, the rise of fundamentalism, and the first Gulf War.

The first edition of The Painting Stick, gathering poems written in 1991-2002, was published by Peter Robinson's Pine Wave Press in Sendai, Japan, in 2005. A few of the poems have been revised for this expanded edition, which also includes eleven previously uncollected poems written during the same period. The book begins with a series of prose pieces, which are followed by poems with various European (especially Italian and Greek) settings, poems about the artists Joseph Beuys and Alfred Wallis, and a tribute to the seventeenth-century author John Aubrey - together making for a collection grounded in place, in language and in history.

The Pleasures of Peace gathers recent poems by Paul Rossiter, mostly written on the movein 2018-19, and concerned with such matters as Pythagoras, The Tempest, Westray andPapa Westray, a Neolithic house, biscuits and oatcakes, seabirds in flight, a hot spring inAkita, big seas and snow rollers, jazz in Tokyo, elegiac memory, Kamakura in February, the other side of the world, Isamu Noguchi, a feat of archery at the Battle of Yashima(1185), Issa's words for rain, the late Cantos of Ezra Pound, the London Blitz, rosebaywillow herb, Tomas Transtr mer, the Plymouth Blitz, the Rame Peninsula in easternCornwall, Richard Carew of Antony, incidents in Brexitland, Barbara Hepworth's garden, the Isles of Scilly, an approach to Penzance by sea in rain, and the onset of autumn.

Passages Poems 1969 - 2019 gathers in one volume much of Paul Rossiter's poetry, written over the course of fifty years in many countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It includes most of the poems from the five retrospective collections and two gatherings of new work published by Isobar Press between 2013 and 2021, together with some poems that only ever appeared in In Daylight and Monumenta Nipponica, both published in 1995. A few entirely new pieces have been added.