199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees

Sascha Akhtar's method-writing invites the poetry into a pre-envisaged form which is then adhered to stringently. The original manuscript was written continuously on exactly 199 pages. The poet was interested in the idea of 99 names of Divine Power in Sufi philosophy, with the 100th name being a secret. The poets imagination was captured by this idea that a whole is not complete without one of its "names," and yet the revelation of that name is not tenable in our current human incarnation. The forms on each page of the trees, sorry, poems were worked carefully. Each page has its own shape & presence. The title was pre-assigned as a philosophical & semantic conundrum that arose whilst on a walk through Kew gardens with friends. The horticultural convention of the English has always been to re-name and assign a Latin name. In this way, the native identity or "is-ness" of types of flora may never be known. A tree that only grows native to Japan, has its own identity in its country, in Japanese. By merit of simply transplanting it, that name may never be known. Within these pages is both macrocosm and microcosm - journeys to other planets, jaguars, ibexes, toothless sharks, the "vanguard" of poetry, a woman abandoned, cruelty, a depth of thought & emotion that stays steady holding the reader in its thrall and strange creatures mentioned only as 'jagged kittenstars'. The book is honestly, pure transcendental rock n' roll epic.