This is the first book I have ever read of Japanese poetry and I am abolutely glad that I decided to go and read it, the imaginary of the poetry is absolutely stunning. We get the feeling that the writer was writing something that he was seeing right in front of him at the time he was writing it and the reader gets that impression also. His poetry is rich in nature images and their symbolism related with the human experience, in all aspects of the human experience, but most of all the emotional experience. That being perhaps the reason behind there are some poems that leave us feeling like ????? due to how absurd they might seem (what makes sense if you think about how absurd some of the human experiences are), even if I would argue that perhaps the translation might have something to do with that. As always, or almost always, something happens to be lost in translations with books, and I fear that this might be the case with Nakahara Chūya poetry. 

At the end of the introduction of the book there is  a part that says "Some of Nakahara's images and metaphors may strike the Western reader as strange. Notes have been provided wherever helpful, but in general this strangeness is not a product of any culture gap, nor of the translation process. It is Nakahara's own." and I absolutely loved that they said that, because that unique characteristic appears often in his literature and it is such a remarkable characteristic of his poetry, alongside how much he includes sonoric details other than just words in the poems, which is truly helps with picturing the imaginary that the author is describing.

This being said, if you are the type of person that usually skips the introduction with historical context at the beggining of classical books I would highly advise you not to do it with Nakahara Chūya poetry, the context with the information about the life of the author will help you better understand and interpret the authors poems alongside their meaning and reason to be. 

Never whispered 'what the fvck' with so much emotion after finishing reading a book while also starting to cry because of the insane amount of emotions that the book somehow manages to make a person simultaneously experience while reading it. Too many emotions for a book with only 175 pages, it's actually insane.