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LYNX A Journal for Linking Poets | ||||
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BOOK REVIEWS Slow Spring Water: The Life Poetry of Melissa Dixon by Melissa Dixon. Introduction by Michael McClintock. Slowspringpress, 213-2075 Milton Street, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8R 1N8,. ISBN 0-9780815-0-1.. Perfect bound, 61 pages 5.25 x 7.5 inches, $10.00 US / $12.00 Canada. Modern English Tanka, 1:1, Fall, 2006. 252 pages, trade
paperback, color covers, b/w interior art. Denis M. Garrison, editor;
Michael McClintock, contributing editor. Available through Lulu.com. but then you danced. Jeanne Lupton. Oakland, CA: n. p., 2006. Saddle-stitched 4.25 x 5.5 in., 60 pages Black and white cover with an interior illustrations by the author. Blue Night & The Inadequacy Of Long-Stemmed Roses. By Larry Kimmel. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340, . Comb-bound,6 x 9 inches, 95 pages, $11.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-9743856-9-3. Utamaro: A Chorus of Birds. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Akamatsu no Kinkei, ed. Kitagawa Utamaro, illus. James T. Kenny, trans. New York: Viking Press, 1981 [Tokyo, 1790]. Accordion fold art book, color interiors, unpaginated. Out of print. Perhaps available online as used or rare book. Obon: The Festival of the Dead by Terry Watada. Thistledown Press, 633 Main Street, Saskatoon, SK S7H 0J8 Canada, ISBN 978-1-897235-14-0, $15.95 CDN / $14.95 USD. Perfect bound, 94 pp 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Reviews by Jane Reichhold Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden. Cheng & Tsui Asian Literature Series: 2006.ISBN:. 0-88727-494-3. Perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches, 132 pages, bilingual Japanese & English with biographies. The Pleiades at Dawn: A tanka Collection by Jeanne Emrich. .Lone Egret Press, Edina Minnesota: 2006. Perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches, 72 pages, US$14; Canada $16, add $2 for postage and handling in USA and Canada; $4 elsewhere. Book Advertisements Sweeps Of Rain a haibun book about dementia, published in the Nederlands as Vegen van Regen by Geert Verbeke. Now available in English ISBN - 81-8253-06-87. Paperback A5, 128 pages, 18 us$ Publisher Dr. Santosh Kumar Website: Cyberwit India. Geert Verbeke, Leo Baekelandlaan 14, B-8500 Kortrijk , Flanders - Belgium - Europe. Fire Pearls: Short Masterpieces Of The Human Heart. Edited by M. Kei. Trade paperback, 160 pages, $14.95 USD. Available from Lulu.com or the M. Kei, P O Box 1118, Elkton, MD, 21922-1118 or major booksellers. Cherry Blossom Epiphany " the poetry and philosophy of
a flowering tree " Tree Reisener's new chapbook, Liminalog a collection of ghazals and sijo, is now available. If you'd like Liminalog as a free e-book, just visit the website and blog with her. You can read Silva Ley's complete translations of her book, Vogeline, first published in Dutch as a supplement to this issue of Lynx. BOOKS WANTING REVIEWERS Growing Late by Tom Clausen Tanka Fields by Robert D. Wilson Opal by Sue Stanford Blue Smoke - a two voice improvisation by Sheila Windsor and Larry Kimmel. The Embrace of Planets: 111 haiku by Ban'ya Natsuishi and translated into Romanian by Vasile Moldovan Flori de tei - Lime-tree flowers a collection of haiku from Romania on the subject of Lime Trees bilingual with translations by Vasile Moldovan. Amber: dementia - haiku by Geert Verbeke in Dutch and English In the Grip of Sirens: Renegade Renga, Tenacious Tanka, Outlaw Haiku by R. W. Watkins / Robin Tilley Firepearls: Short masterpieces of the Human Heart edited by M. Kei Raffaello's Azure by Ruri Hazama, assisted by Amelia Fielden. All I Can Do by Aya Yuhki Reeds: Contemporary Haiga 2006, editor Jeanne Emrich Wazowski Himself and other poems by Ed Baranosky On This Same Star, selections from the tanka collection Will by Mariko Kitakubo translated by Amelia Fielden The Solitude of Cities by Ruth Holzer Things Just Come Through by Ed Baker |
BOOK REVIEWS
Slow Spring Water: The life poetry of Melissa Dixon, is a professional looking chapbook of 61 pages. It features tanka, haiku, tanka sequences, and haibun. It covers diverse subjects such as the poet’s childhood on the plains of Canada, her migration to the coast of British Columbia, and her visit to an abandoned monastery in India. Dixon is at her best when she is at her most personal. In her haibun, "The Conspiracy," she writes about taking her son’s ashes to spread on the sea — prohibited by law, but a law honored more in the breach than the observance. Her son lost his life on New Year’s Day and the family scattered his ashes in May. winter of waiting The family enacted its private ceremony and returned, accompanied by seabirds. The astonishing spectacle of thousands of seabirds pacing the boat provides the poet and her family with relief and the restoration of faith in the beauty of the world. As such it is a fitting closure for the haibun. Unfortunately, the last haiku is not strong enough to satisfy. sooty shearwaters – While all of her poems are well-crafted and lyric, her strongest poems are those in which she speaks her heart directly. These are generally tanka, and it is fortunate that tanka make up the bulk of the chapbook. in my palm a rosy stone And also: keening Manitoba winds, Both of these tanka paint moving portraits of women, causing us to believe that we have glimpsed something essential about each woman. We cannot help thinking that if we met them in person, we would experience the flash of recognition, I know you. The power of the known also shows up in her haibun ‘The Caves of Kanheri,’ written about her trip to India. The prose is lively and engaging, full of the wry wit of a wise woman who knows how to ingratiate herself with her fellow travelers. "Traveling alone in a strange land may be perilous for anyone. But for a woman it can at times work in her favor. She could, for instance, find herself escorted by kind fellow-countrymen to the hidden heart of that land, where no buses go. They tend to trust her. Does she not speak their language? Is she not reasonably dressed, courteous, interested? Yes, she is company, a friend." The prose description of her travels with her newfound companions is delightful, but alas, once she reaches the caves and must grapple with the work of monks long dead, her haiku is not equal to the occasion. Nonetheless, although her haiku are not as strong as her prose and tanka, occasionally they are perfect. One of my favorite poems from the book is a haiku: worn doorstep The image is limpid, original, and powerful. It resonates with all the associations of old houses, loss, and abandonment that the reader has ever seen or experienced. It presents us with a moment that might have been found in a Wyeth painting, but wasn’t; we believe that the poet actually encountered this particular step in this particular field. Although we know she might have made the whole thing up (how could we ever know when a poet is making use of poetic license?), we are convinced that if we went there, the scene would be exactly as she made us see it. The poetic persona that comes through the book is that of a charming and ingratiating older woman, the kind of person we are pleased to discover sitting next to us on the train or ferryboat. Slow Spring Water is a pleasant interlude between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of our busy world. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ Modern English Tanka, 1:1, Fall, 2006. 252 pages, trade paperback, color covers, b/w interior art. Denis M. Garrison, editor; Michael McClintock, contributing editor. Available through Lulu.com. I just received my copy of Modern English Tanka, Fall, 2006, the inaugural issue of a fine new journal of tanka in English. Edited by Denis M. Garrison, who previously edited Haiku Harvest for six years, it's a major addition to the world of tanka in English. Containing approximately 500 tanka, several of which are taiga (tanka and art), plus essays and articles, it presents established and emerging tanka poets. Each poet is invited to send up to 40 tanka from which the editor selects zero to forty. Most poets are represented with one to ten tanka while a handful of poets are presented with twenty or thirty tanka. This provides ample opportunity to enjoy the various voices in their many moods and nuances. The non-fiction articles educate the readers about various aspects of tanka poetry and are making an important addition to what is a rather small body of literary criticism and analysis of tanka in English. Much more scholarship of this sort is needed; it is not sufficient simply to write tanka, we must talk about the craft and history of tanka and the ways in which it is or could be practiced in English. In this regard, although tanka has been written in English just as long as haiku has, haiku scholarship is far ahead of tanka scholarship. At 252 pages, Modern English Tanka is a satisfyingly solid trade paperback with an understated yet handsome full color cover. It's a journal any poetry lover would be delighted to own, and from which any tanka poet could learn. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ Cherry Blossom Epiphany " the poetry and philosophy of a
flowering tree " If the solemn yet happy New Year's is the most important celebration of Japanese culture, and the quiet aesthetic practice of Moon-viewing in the fall the most elegant expression of Pan-Asian Buddhism=religion, the subject of this book, Blossom-viewing "which generally means sitting down together in vast crowds to drink, dance, sing and otherwise enjoy the flowering cherry in full-bloom." is less a rite than a riot (a word originally meaning an "uproar"). The major carnival of the year, it is unusual for being held on a date that is not determined by astronomy, astrology or the accidents of history as most such events are in literate cultures. It takes place whenever the cherry trees are good and ready. Enjoyed in the flesh, the blossom-viewing, or hanami, is also of the mind, so much so, in fact, that poetry is often credited with the spread of the practice over the centuries from the Imperial courts to the maids of Edo. Nobles enjoyed link-verse contests presided over by famous poet-judges. Hermits hung poems feting this flower of flowers (to say the generic "flower"= hana in Japanese connotes "cherry!") on strips of paper from the branches of lone trees where only the wind would read them. In the Occident, too, flowers embody beauty and serve as reminders of mortality, but there is no flower that, like the cherry blossom, stands for all flowers. Even the rose, by any name, cannot compare with the sakura in depth and breadth of poetic trope or viewing practice. In Cherry Blossom Epiphany, Robin D. Gill hopes to help readers experience, metaphysically, some of this alternative world. The standard measure for selection in haiku, as in any literary art, is excellence; but excellence by itself can be terribly boring. The ku in this book have been selected for the information and evidence of natural or cultural history they provide, their rarity value in filling out a poorly exampled sub-theme, suitability for translation and/or explanation, wit, precedence and dozens of other reasons among which excellence is only one of many. The practical challenge was not to sort ku on a scale from best-to-worst, but to find a way to organize thousands of them! and hundreds of older 13-beat waka (unlike, sea cucumber, which became a subject for poetry with haikai, cherry blossom poems go back over a thousand years). The main categories developed are 1) The blossom-viewing sequence (waiting-for-the-bloom, the viewing, return-trip, etc.; 2) Environmental phenomena (cold, rain, wind, etc.); 3) Types of cherries (single-petal, double-petal, pendulant, etc.); 4) Types of people (blossom guards, vendors, children, etc.); 5) Activities (drinking, singing, eating, etc.); and 6) Concepts (patriotism, woman-as-blossom (and vice-versa), conservation, etc.). The plot loosely follows the first category, chronology, with other categories woven in as needed to treat the reader to variety and complement the neighboring chapters. More info is up at paraverse.org. Translator friend Masako thought the following was a good appraisal of the situation: "Robin D. Gill's previous anthologies of translated haiku and natural history were highly acclaimed for raising the bar of translation (Japanese-English) while being fun to read for all who love ideas.* Yet, he remains unknown outside of narrow haiku and scientific circles, either for lack of publicity or because few book-buyers were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the warty sea cucumber and pesky bug, respective protagonists of Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! and Fly-ku! With his latest work, Cherry Blossom Epiphany, Gill takes up a subject that is not only less grotesque but lyrical if not romantic. Anyone who appreciates flowers, drinking (blossom-viewings are not tea-parties) and thinking is a potential reader. It remains to be seen, however, whether 740 pages with 3000+ poems and multiple translations will prove the exception and sell in a culture where short books rule. Advertised by Robin Gill _____________________________ 17 Minutes by Matthew Hupert. Neuronautic Press, 332 E 74th Street, Suite 5B, New York City, NY 10021 USA. Paper, saddle-stitched, 18 pages, 4.25 x 5.5 inches. In this aptly named chapbook that takes about seventeen minutes to read, author Matthew Hupert has provided a number of short poems: haiku, tercets, tanka, limericks, and free verse. He mixes urban and the natural worlds with a distinctly modern funk that finds haiku-like details in all that he surveys, including what he sees from his fifth floor ‘patio’ (his neighbor’s rooftop). When Hubert resists the urge to tell us what he’s telling us and eschews clever rhyme and wordplay, his poems have a stark power. Love Poem "No," you said Some of his longer poems manage to maintain this succinctness to good effect: When your eyes shark me I dart In ‘When your eyes shark me,’ there is no need for the poet to belabor the situation or to linger over his emotional state; the images are effective metaphors for a domestic dispute and its repercussions. There are no unnecessary words here; the poet trusts his art and his reader. Unfortunately, not all the poems are this strong. Hubert reminds me of one of my other interests: minor league baseball. There is talent and hard work here, but errors, too. Part of the appeal of an emerging poet like Hubert is the hope you will get to see him grow before your eyes, then get promoted to the major leagues. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ but then you danced. Jeanne Lupton. Oakland, CA: 2006. Saddle-stitched 4.25 x 5.5 in., 60 pages, black and white cover with an interior illustrations by the author. An attractive chapbook on good quality paper, but then you danced presents tanka poetry one per page interspersed with occasional illustrations by the author. The quality of the poetry is excellent, and evokes the ‘tanka spirit’ we all admire so much. Lupton’s keenly observed details of her life serve as a lens focusing greater human truths; she is not just a woman, but Everywoman. She journeys through her life with the intensely emotional but never sentimental heart of a poet, faithfully recording her truths that speak to all women. your touch Lupton speaks the immortal power of love with eighteen short syllables. In this miniature masterpiece nothing needs to be added and nothing needs to be taken away. She perfectly captures the illuminating joy of requited love, its breathtaking awe, and radiant beauty. how green the green In this verse Lupton utilizes the power of repetition to evoke the such-ness of each item named, and in so doing, evokes the such-ness of the poet herself. The beauty of the scene after the storm becomes much more than a symbol of the poet after whatever travail from which she has just emerged, it becomes a cosmic truth to be celebrated with joy. The natural, the personal, and the universal resonate through this poem, doing what tanka does best. autumn dusk Lupton’s joy is tempered with loneliness, regret, and the awareness of the fragile ephemeral of human existence, characteristics which when taken together the Japanese call aware. Few Western poets can evoke aware well, finding it all too tempting to slide off into moralizing, symbolism, sentimentality, or simply overstating their moment. Lupton evokes the chill of the season and the chill of loneliness with the deftness of a sumi-e painter. The illustrations are simple and understated and suit the poet’s mood and style, but are not always as strong as the poems themselves. Even so, they are never a liability. There are many other poems in but then you danced which I enjoyed and the overall quality is excellent. There is much here to recommend to both the reader of poetry in general and to young poets seeking a role model. In short, of the myriad books of tanka that have been published in recent years, this is one of the best. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ Fire Pearls: Short Masterpieces Of The Human Heart. Edited by M. Kei. Trade paperback, 160 pages, $14.95 USD. Available from Lulu.com or tM. Kei, P. O. Box 1118, Elkton, MD, 21922-1118 or major booksellers. This handsome new anthology of nearly four hundred tanka, kyoka, cinquains, and free verse by more than fifty poets from around the world includes both well known and emerging voices, arranged into five seasons that explore the human heart through its many manifestations of love and passion. "Fire Pearls will be quite a surprise for those who are frequent readers of tanka, the five-line poem with a 1300 year history. For newcomers to tanka, the poems should be a challenge and a delight. The last section, entitled 'Fifth Season,' is a tour de force. To journey through this anthology is to experience key moments of our lives." — Sanford Goldstein, co-translator of Tangled Hair: Selected Tanka from Midaregami "What a magnificent anthology . . . it weakens, heartens, humbles, enlarges, and delivers so many poetic truths that I just am so glad to see this come to fruition." — Tom Clausen, author of Growing Late Excerpts from Fire Pearls: between sun and shade Michael McClintock
the tilt Larry Kimmel
rain-furled hibiscus— Beverley George
White birch Zhanna P. Rader
mourners assemble John Daleiden The above, the advertising of the book, was written by M. Kei. _____________________________ Blue Night & The Inadequacy Of Long-Stemmed Roses. By Larry Kimmel. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340, . Comb-bound,6 x 9 inches, 95 pages, $11.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-9743856-9-3. Blue Night & the inadequacy of long-stemmed roses are two books in one by Larry Kimmel, well known as a tanka poet and editor of Winfred Press. Blue Night is a collection of short poems, but the inadequacy of long-stemmed roses is subtitled ‘a collage of cherita’, each of which takes up about one half the book. Inadequacy. . . was previously published in 2001. Blue Night presents various short poems, including free verse, tanka, free verse tanka, tanka sequences, haiku, and others. Generally speaking, Kimmel at his best in the shorter forms. Some of his longer poems, such as "Night Journey," lack sufficient tension to justify their length. The same scene was treated more briefly and more effectively in cherita #72: a streetlamp casting a path over snow-melt that’s all it takes Kimmel is an excellent tanka poet and many of the tanka in the book treat romantic and erotic themes along with their inevitable disappointments. stark from the shower Several of his romantic tanka have already been published, but some of the tanka I had not seen before were some of his best. They were striking not only for their quality, but for treating subjects not frequently seen in contemporary English-language tanka, such as the following: we did what we could Included among the poems are several short lyrics of sijo that add a pleasant variety: Two carved their names, enclosed them in a heart,
The cherita is an invented form named a few years ago by ai li but started by Elizabeth St. Jacques. My previous encounters with it had not impressed me; it seems a fad among poets to create knew poetic forms and give them excessive rules and exotic names. Yet in Kimmel’s capable hands, the cherita offers poetic dignity worthy of serious consideration. A form of one line, followed by two lines, followed by three lines, it has something of the cinquain’s melody, but is more flexible about syllable count. a bead curtain sways long long stockings climb when I was a lad Kimmel’s cherita are very tankaesque, selecting ‘tanka moments’ (if there is such a thing) to present in a short image full of emotional resonance. Many of his cherita feel very much like tanka formatted in six lines. "two Manhattans coming up" he wants to know maraschino cherry Particularly interesting are Kimmel’s experiments with tanka in alternative formats. Some of these poems would not be recognizable as tanka if the reader had not previously seen them in five line formats. Yet the alternative lineation provides structure and suppleness that the block of five lines down lacks.
"okay! okay! he’s everything a woman wants.
The poem above could have been rearranged in traditional tanka format (and has been, elsewhere): "okay! okay! I argue that Kimmel’s alternative lineation is more effective both as poetry and as tanka, bringing out the two part nature of the structure and the tensions and distances of the relationship. Some critics would argue that if it’s not in five lines, it’s just a short free verse, so why call it tanka? Tanka is not published in five lines in Japan, so we could just as easily question why five lines has become the de facto form of tanka in English. The five part structure that underlies the five line convention is clearly present in the poem above. Either it’s a tanka or it’s not, and rearranging the lines is not what makes that determination. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ blond red Mustang... a gathering of small poems by Art Stein. Slate Roof: A Publishing Collective, 15 Warwick Avenue, Northfield, MA 01360 USA . Flat-spine, 30 pages, 9 x 6 inches, $11.00. ISBN 0-9760643-2-4 blond red mustang is an engaging set of short poems presented in a simple chapbook format. Light and serious verse in various forms such as haiku, senryu, tanka, and free verse are arranged in thematic groups. Each has its merits. The lighter poems are an agreeable diversion and make up a large portion of the book. Stein is particularly good at capturing the humanity of a moment with an apt turn of phrase; the following senryu are typical. with great deliberation prepared for His tanka are generally more serious. They are often what the Japanese would call ‘dry,’ which is to say, lacking an overt human presence. The following verse from the tanka sequence ‘Winter Beach’ is an example: green margin This is an acute observation of the natural operations of the sea and its margins, a subject often celebrated in poetry, but usually with a romantic rather than an honest eye. As a poet of the water myself, I appreciate the accuracy of his vision, as well as the poetic quality of the scene. Yet this tanka can be read deeper, taken as a metaphor of the human existence (or at least the author’s existence). The tanbun are also interesting and avoid the very common problem of simply using the prose to explain the poem or the poem to summarize the prose. At first glance there is no apparent relationship between the tanka and its prose, as in the "Babe Magnet," an observation of an elderly farmer’s charismatic influence on diner waitresses. The tanka that accompanies it is: lifting off The pairing of the great blue heron and the flirtatious old farmer grants a gravitas that satisfies the reader’s interest. Stein masterfully imbues the old farmer with a roguish dignity that leads us from bafflement to humor to admiration; both for the character and the poet’s skill. Several of Stein’s longer poems are accompanied by envoys, usually in the form of haiku, but sometimes as tanka. Regrettably, these longer poems with their consciously poetic language fail to please. They contrast well with the starkness of their envoys, providing an interesting interplay between the two, but ultimately fail to satisfy. Nonetheless, the attempt heightens the interest of the poems and inspires a poet to try the technique for himself. Stein’s greatest skill is the way in which he juxtaposes his subject matter within and without the poems. Similar poems are grouped together to seduce the reader into a particular frame of mind, but not so many that the reader becomes weary. They alternate with other poems that invite a different perspective and so refresh the reader’s attention and interest. The pacing is excellent, leading the reader through a journey on the micro-scale of the poems themselves and on the larger scale of the chapbook taken as a whole work. Would that more poets paid as much attention and did it so well as Stein. Although not all the poems are to my taste, this chapbook is one I’m setting aside for further study because there is much to be learned and much to appreciate. The journeyman poet and the reader wanting something more complex than the usual pretty poetry books will each find something to reward their attention. Reviewed by M. Kei
_____________________________ Utamaro: A Chorus of Birds. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Akamatsu no Kinkei, ed. Kitagawa Utamaro, illus. James T. Kenny, trans. New York: Viking Press, 1981 [Tokyo, 1790]. Accordion fold art book, color interiors, unpaginated. Out of print. Perhaps available online as used or rare book. A Chorus of Birds is the only book of kyoka (humorous tanka) to be translated into English, which makes it of interest just because it is the only book of kyoka accessible to English speakers, but above and beyond that, the book features beautiful illustrations by Utamaro, one of Japan’s most famous woodblock artists. Most famous for his bijin - beautiful women pictures, Utamaro shows himself to be a master of the natural world. The birds are highly accurate, enabling their species to be identified. Latin, Japanese, and English names for the birds are included in the caption descriptions. The book is one of many special editions that were ordered by kyoka circles active in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kyoka, ‘mad verse’ or ‘comic tanka’ were present as early as the 8th century and appear in the Man’yoshu; the first kyoka collection, Hyakushu Kyoka – Kyoka On One Hundred Brands Of Drinks was edited by a priest named Gyogetsubo who lived 1265-1328 AD. His book features kyoka parodies of famous literature as kinds of drinks. By the early 18th century, kyoka was popular in the region around Kyoto and Osaka, then spread to Edo. It branched off and became its own independent genre during this period and was immensely popular; a key element of its appeal was that it did not conform to the restrictions on language and content that applied to waka. Thus any educated person could compose and appreciate kyoka whereas waka was confined to a rarified atmosphere of those families who were skilled in understanding the archaic language and intricate rules that dominated waka of the time. Arguably, much of our modern English-language tanka with its emphasis on colloquial language and ordinary life is kyoka rather than tanka. It is no surprise that kyoka nearly died out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when tanka poets threw off the restrictions of the old waka and began writing more direct and personal tanka in ordinary language. Surely the immensely popular kyoka must have shaped the thinking of Japanese poets who reformed tanka, but the influence of kyoka has never been explored in English. Generally speaking, kyoka in English is understood to be ‘humorous tanka.’ It frequently parodies tanka and has therefore been conceived of as a kind of ‘anti-tanka,’ an erudite game that could be played only by people well versed in tanka itself. Yet the kyoka of A Chorus of Birds belie that. Humor is present, and parody, but many of the verses are so gently romantic that the English reader would be hard-pressed to explain how y differ from what he understands tanka to be. Yamadori no The copper-headed pheasant --Miyanaka no Tsukinaro The poem above with its natural image and subjective response giving voice to a romantic plaint is a staple of the tanka genre. What makes this poem kyoka instead of tanka is that it was written in the colloquial language of the day by a person who was most likely a commoner or low ranking samurai, and not in the rarified literary language by a courtier or government official. Other poems in evince the humorous parody which is the hallmark of kyoka. Consider the following verse: Na ni tachite True to his name, --Shino no Tamaoke This parody works on two levels. First, there is the commentary on human nature – which of us hasn’t encountered a person who resembles the woodpecker of the poem? Ostensibly a bird poem, it is really a commentary on a human foible of the sort well-loved in senryu, the other genre that was immensely popular at the same time as kyoka. The other level of parody is a literary one. The natural image sets up an expectation of the usual romanticized and idealized emotional response, but instead delivers a frank criticism of an unattractive human trait. The expectations of the tanka form have been simultaneously adhered to yet violated, making this poem delightfully fresh. Kyoka also ventured into territory that was a little risque compared to the restraints of waka. The poem below has a titillating quality that would have been considered vulgar and unacceptable in courtly waka. Noki chikaku Near the eaves --Nori no Suiyu Malice, too, animates some of these verses, again, on a romantic theme. Taka naraba If I were --Akamatsu no Kinkei All in all, the poems are enjoyable, the illustrations beautiful, and the prefaces and notes useful. A Chorus of Birds can be found through various secondhand book dealers at reasonable prices. It is an excellent addition to your tanka library. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ Sweeps Of Rain a haibun book about dementia, published in the Nederlands as Vegen van Regen by Geert Verbeke. Now available in English ISBN - 81-8253-06-87. Paperback A5, 128 pages, 18 us$ Publisher Dr. Santosh Kumar Website: Cyberwit India. Geert Verbeke, Leo Baekelandlaan 14, B-8500 Kortrijk , Flanders - Belgium - Europe. GEERT VERBEKE: Born in Kortrijk, Flanders (Europe) on 31 May 1948. Children: Hans (1969), Saskia (1972), Merlijn (°1984) & Jonas (°1986). His soulmate: Jenny Ovaere is an ex-teacher, now companion for Joker adventurous travelling. Geert Verbeke is the author of a meditation book, poetry albums, fairy-tales, a book on jazz, books on playing cards, books on singing bowls & 7 haiku (haibun) books. Free thinker & democrate. Recorded 11 cd's with relaxation music on singing bowls. SWEEPS OF RAIN: A light shiver happens to you, when you open this remarkable diary. Oh, please, no… poetry about the illness dementia? Yet, the first page already will grip you. No clinical picture, but an example of the art of living slides along. Day after touching, humorous, sometimes very heavy day. A surprising, intense ‘dialogue’ between Sarah de Boeck and her son and ‘coating care provider’ John, supported by his wife Mia. Sarah suffers from Pick’s disease. First it affects your personality, then your memory and at last your total health. The author notes down this process of gradual changing and losing almost playful and light. In a rich, sometimes rough, associative language. But in the haiku sadness sounds through: touching her toys – John conquers his daily pain by tactic and creative reactions. It cannot be denied that mother and son are cast from the same mould. Their exuberant fantasy always wants the free rein. That’s why John let his mother go on living in her own house and art gallery as long as possible. Close to her piano, in her own atmosphere of artist and potter. There she can feel safe, surrounded by the treasures of her travels, especially from ancient cultures. John takes a difficult daily walk with her. Included is the risk that she tears loose and runs into a shop or building, that was once the slaughterhouse. She was a great narrator but gradually her stories relapse to a childish jabbering. Dates, details and events become snippets in a sort of language – in – between. John stimulates her memory by practice in front of a mirror. He perceives that touching and caressing relax her most of all. The day comes that Sarah can’t longer stay alone. She is moved to the nursing home. Difficult for John. There he sees ‘a procession from the world of Jeroen Bosch. Fear for life, fear for death.’ Sarah falls in apathy, but gradually she feels better, surrounded by solid structure and kind care. Finally John is able to weep, ‘though the universe is generous, in spite of all the waste away.’ His coping with grief is shown by pages long roaming in his mother’s house, taking all the beautiful items in his hand. He remembers her trips and events in a poetical avalanche, her favourite music on the background. The last hours need no words… After her death John decorates Sarah’s photo with a crockery scarab - the morning figure of Re - as a grave gift. Because ‘death is a mild final chord’. My conclusion: Sweeps of Rain’ consists of as many fits of sun. The 85 haibun, not longer than one page, are constructive, in variety of contemplation and anecdotes. A book to approach in averse and appreciate after reading. Silva Ley for LYNX. Sent by Geert Verbeke as advertising for his book. _____________________________ Obon: The Festival of the Dead by Terry Watada. Thistledown Press, 633 Main Street, Saskatoon, SK S7H 0J8 Canada, ISBN 978-1-897235-14-0, $15.95 CDN / $14.95 USD. Perfect bound, 94 pp 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Obon: Festival of the Dead is the third book of poetry from Canadian poet, Terry Watada. While it stands independent of the previous books, A Thousand Homes and Ten Thousand Views of Rain, those books provide a context, detailing the poet’s family of origin, their experience of internment during WWII, and the psychological devastation of being an alien in the country of his birth. Obon is both lament in which he pours out his frustration and rages over the dying, despair and self-loathing of Asians in Canada and the United States, and redemption in which the power of the sacred dance permits the ghosts of the hungry dead to be welcomed, acknowledged, and ultimately redeemed, the poet along with them. The poems are composed of many short lines, reminiscent of tanka in their imagery and subjective content, but they are not tanka. The previous books do include tanka by Watada and his relatives, but Watada, torn between his Japanese roots and modern Canadian reality, searches for means of expression in jazz, the black man’s music with conscious irony. Unfortunately, when he wanders too far in this direction he slides into urban angst, which aside from the color of the prostitutes and junkies and the Chinatown setting, looks pretty much like other poems by angry young men of color. Perhaps that is the point - grown-up crack babies with coffee-ring circles under their eyes look pretty much the same regardless of race. His relationship with his family and culture is mixed, part of love and part of loathing, yet he finds the strength to hang onto the good parts and to accept the imperfections of his family and community with wide open eyes. Haka Omairi the letters Watada’s poetry is a powerful antidote to much of the japonisme that afflicts modern English language tanka and haiku; here is no romantization of an exotic Other at whose poetic feet we can sit, seeking wisdom (as long as there’s not too much work required); for Watada, the Buddha is not a Zen concept to be meditated upon, but a living deity who sleeps and only occasionally awakens to the agony of his worshippers. Amidst all the suffering and angst is the unspoken cry that has afflicted many a searcher, "Why does the Divine Goodness allow such things to happen?" Just as the question is never articulated in so many words, so to does the answer remain unspoken, and Watada must dance his own dance of the dead and find his own personal redemption. Reviewed by M. Kei _____________________________ Tree Reisener's new chapbook, Liminalog a collection of ghazals and sijo, is now available. If you'd like Liminalog as a free e-book, just visit the website and blog with her. You can read Silva Ley's complete translations of her book, Vogeline, first published in Dutch as a supplement to this issue of Lynx. _____________________________ Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden. Cheng & Tsui Asian Literature Series: 2006.ISBN: 0-88727-494-3. Perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches, 132 pages, bilingual Japanese & English with biographies. Kozue Uzawa, professor, poet and translator has recently become the editor of Gusts, the journal of the Canadian Tanka Society. From her unique position, she brings a valuable look into the situation of Japanese tanka written in the last century. Not only does the reader get an impression of where these writers are emotionally and poetically, but also through the collection, a vision of what kind of tanka Kozue Uzawa admires. The title is taken from: ferris wheel Kyoko Kuriki In the Preface, in both English and Japanese, Kozue Uzawa writes that this book is the result of her saving poems she liked in a notebook over ten years. Her object was to introduce English readers to these authors and at the same time give Japanese readers, especially those in in universities, lessons in translation. The poems are presented first in English, without caps and sentence punctuation, but with commas and dashes. Then the kanji, horizontally dissects the page in the middle. Below, in five lines is the poem in romaji. In the translation there were many times the line order was disregarded when the original could have been maintained in the poem and the English could have then retained the short, long, short, long, long pattern of the lines. For this reason, English tanka writers can be led astray if they attempt to use these translations a models for their own work. Also, the majority of the poems chosen for the collection presented the flattest, simplest examples of tanka — those with clichéd or traditional techniques and images. This statement does not disparage the heartfelt sincerely of the authors or the quality of their work, but only points out how far the tanka form has moved in the last century. There were gems of lyrical and imaginative images such as in: looking at Kimihiko Takano Ferris Wheel contains a valuable bibliography and short biographies of the authors so the reader who discovers a writer of interest, can find more of that poet's work. Ms. Uzawa was assisted in the English versions by the acclaimed translator, Amelia Fielden. Reviewed by Jane Reichhold _____________________________ The Pleiades at Dawn: A tanka Collection by Jeanne Emrich. Lone Egret Press, Edina Minnesota: 2006. Perfect bound, 5 x 8 inches, 72 pages, US$14; Canada $16, add $2 for postage and handling in USA and Canada; $4 elsewhere. Since first knowing Jeanne Emrich's haiku, and her lovely handmade books it has been a joy watching her discover tanka. Now, at long, last readers have a collection of 56 of her best tanka to enjoy between the shiny covers of a book that would be at home on any bookstore's shelves. It has been like watching a very, very talented child come into her own as an adult. Finally the tanka form is capable of portraying the multiple layers of her poetry. As Amelia Fielden writes in the Foreword: "The Pleiades at Dawn, while being a thoroughly modern collections, fits beautifully within the love tradition. Its very title poem echoes the legacy of longing and loss from Japanese court poetry of more than 1,000 years ago." how was I to know Jeanne is accomplished enough to have other poems in her collection — ones showing much more complicated use of the pivot such as: how long has it been Jeanne Emrich is also an accomplished artist of the brush and a Chinese ink drawing graces the cover of The Pleiades at Dawn as well as many of her haiga. For four years she has edited and published Reeds: Contemporary Haiga. Reviewed by Jane Reichhold _____________________________ BOOKS WANTING REVIEWERS Growing Late by Tom Clausen Tanka Fields by Robert D. Wilson Opal by Sue Stanford Blue Smoke - a two voice improvisation by Sheila Windsor and Larry Kimmel. The Embrace of Planets: 111 haiku by Ban'ya Natsuishi and translated into Romanian by Vasile Moldovan Flori de tei - Lime-tree flowers a collection of haiku from Romania on the subject of Lime Trees bilingual with translations by Vasile Moldovan. Amber: dementia - haiku by Geert Verbeke in Dutch and English In the Grip of Sirens: Renegade Renga, Tenacious Tanka, Outlaw Haiku by R. W. Watkins / Robin Tilley Firepearls: Short masterpieces of the Human Heart edited by M. Kei Raffaello's Azure by Ruri Hazama, assisted by Amelia Fielden. All I Can Do by Aya Yuhki Reeds: Contemporary Haiga 2006, editor Jeanne Emrich Wazowski Himself and other poems by Ed Baranosky On This Same Star, selections from the tanka collection Will by Mariko Kitakubo translated by Amelia Fielden The Solitude of Cities by Ruth Holzer Things Just Come Through by Ed Baker
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Next Lynx is scheduled for June, 2007.
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