Over the past twenty years, Sam Hamill has published over than thirty volumes of original poetry, essays, and translations of poetry from classical Chinese, Japanese, Ancient Greek, Latin and Estonian. As founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, he has made service to poetry a way of life for nearly a quarter century. But it is in his poetry, in his passionate, lucid insistence that poetry is an essential component of enlightenment, that he distin-guishes himself. "He teaches us" Larry Smith has written in Small Press, "that the 'Zen' poem is any poem that is truly alive to the moment." Selecting from among all his published volumes of poetry except the book-length Triada, and adding over fifty pages of previously uncollected new work, Hamill brings the poetics of "engaged Buddhism" face-to-face with a sweeping erudition and technical virtuosity drawn from eastern and western traditions.
Informed by personal experience as various as building his own home in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest, teaching for thirteen years in prison writing workshops in Alaska, Washington, and California, teaching in artists-in-education programmes across America, or his decades-long commitment to working on behalf of domestic-violence programs, non-violence and conscientious objection, his poetry is deeply felt and plain-spoken, at once scholarly and accessible.