In the Garden of Wind's Delight

By Robert Okaji

In the Garden of Wind's Delight is a collection of 22 short poems exploring the ecology of mind, spirit, and music through meditations on learning to play the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute. 

Robert Okaji holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, toiled as a university administrator, and no longer owns a bookstore. His honors include the 2022 Slipstream Press
Annual Chapbook Prize, the 2021 riverSedge Poetry Prize, and, at the age of nine, the Bar-K Ranch Goat-Catching Championship. He was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer,
and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper—stepson, and cat. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in fall 2024 (not posthumously, he hopes). His poems may be found in Book of Matches, Threepenny Review, Muleskinner Journal, Only Poems, Vox Populi, Stone Circle Review, Shō Poetry Journal, The Big Windows Review, The Night Heron Barks, Indianapolis Review, and other venues.

Reviews

In this collection, Robert Okaji shares his path of learning Suizen, or blowing Zen, the practice of playing the shakuhachi. His challenges are met with humor and persistence; his accomplishments with reflection. Here the author’s mind is realized as tones from the flute, so too as phrases within these poems.
— Mark Howell, editor, Midwest Zen

There is breath in these poems, rounded and clear, learning and delighted,
—Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Mesquites Teach Us to Bend
(Lamar University Literary Press, 2024)

That catch in your throat when a poet gently reaches in and buries your attempts at being unmoved,
with lines like: “A world so incomplete even sound hides its face.” Robert Okaji, such a poet; grows
closer to aching truth and mastery of wordage. The key here is seemingly small collections and as they reduce, more, not less, is said. An apparent contradiction or the Shakuhachi bamboo flute to self-realization? Being moved by words or sound, or neither? Perhaps it’s what’s grasped in the void? “Take this pulse. / Listen to its echo. / Play what you cannot hear.”
—Candice Louisa Daquin, Editor with Raw Earth Ink, Indie Blu(e) Publishing, Tint Journal, The Pine Cone Review and Parcham Literary Journal.

Dimensions: 6.25" x 8.25"

28 pages

The covers are Risograph printed on bamboo paper; the interior is digitally printed. Hand bound in the Yotsume Toji binding-- the traditional four-hole Japanese binding structure.

ISBN: 978-1-955608-11-4