David Budbill has written poems "after" someone else's poems for decades. This is the first time, however, he's written an entire book of poems "after" another poet, another book.
He began writing these poems after a friend gave him his extra copy of Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, translated by W. S. Merwin & Takako Lento (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). In fact his friend gave him this book on his birthday weekend (his 74th) and he's been obsessed with making his own poems from these translations ever since. (He don't read a word of Japanese.) He hasn't been this obsessed by a book, and by making his own poems from that book, since he read Red Pine's new translation of The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).