The Summer Cloud.

First edition, first printing, of this collection of poems by the first Japanese-born writer to publish poetry in English, with an introduction by the English and Canadian poets Richard Le Gallienne and Bliss Carman. This is a remarkably well-preserved copy of an uncommon book.

The poet and critic Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) moved to San Francisco, in 1893, where he worked as a journalist and published his first poems in a small local magazine called The Lark. The present work was published the year after his return to Japan. Noguchi's many other books include Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921), Kamakura (1910), and The Pilgrimage (1909) which contained six haiku, a spare and direct form that inspired Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. He also wrote literary criticism for the Japan Times from 1906 to 1908. On November 3, 1907, he published his most notable piece, "Mr. Yeats and the No," which suggested that William Butler Yeats should study Noh, a form of classical Japanese drama. Noguchi travelled and lectured widely throughout his lifetime, from Oxford and London to prestigious American universities like Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and others. "In London, he met and conversed with numerous significant writers and artists, including Yeats, Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Binyon, Arthur Symons, Sarojini Naidu, Roger Fry, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Joseph Pennell, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska" (Poetry Foundation).

He is also the father of Isamu Noguchi, the internationally renowned sculptor and designer, whose mother was the American journalist and editor Léonie Gilmour.