Kyoto: the Forest Within the Gate

Edith Shiffert was born Edith Marion Marcombe in Toronto, Canada on January 9, 1916. She started writing poetry in her teens. She moved to Hawaii in 1938 and remained there until 1945. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she studied poetry at the University of Washington.

She moved to Kyoto, Japan in 1963 and taught English at colleges and universities there. She was the author of nearly two dozen volumes of poetry including For a Return to Kona, The Kyoto Years, Forest House with Cat, and The Light Comes Slowly. She and Yuki Sawa compiled and translated the volumes Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry and Haiku Master Buson. She died on March 1, 2017 at the age of 101.

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