Full Moon Tide is the result of an interesting idea by the editor Linda Jeannette Ward. She wondered what would happen if the judges of the ten years of the Tanka Splendor Contests were revisited with the request to pick just three 'winners' out of the 31 winners they had originally chosen. Which three tanka would they have ranked above all the others? It is interesting to note that the idea of having a contest that eliminated ranking evidently left such a void, resulting in a need for ranking, that Ms. Ward was committed to the untold hours of work that this book entailed. First she had to contact the nine judges (George Swede of Canada had been the judge for two of the years). Two of the judges, Geraldine C. Little and George Ralph were now deceased so she asked Maggie Chula (who has won more awards for her tanka in the contests than anyone else) and Larry Kimmel (who has also won many years in a row) to be the current judges for the years of 1993 and 1994. So letters went out to Sanford Goldstein, George Swede, Jane Hirshfield, Larry Gross, Leza Lowitz, Hatsue Kawamura and Tom Clausen. Not only were they asked to pick three new winners, but also each judge was asked for comments on their ideas of tanka. In the last five years of the contest tanka sequences had also qualified, so to carry out the theme, the sequences from all the years were judged by Jane Reichhold, the founder of the contest.

Added to this marvelous mix is the artwork of two very different artists. Kay Anderson paints landscapes with sumi-e techniques and Pamela A. Babusci used pressed dried grasses for her compositions. With each tanka generously placed on a page surrounded by white space the eye welcomes the artwork on the pages between. Not only is each judge given a biography along with his or her comments, in the back of the book, each of the winners has a paragraph of biography. The list of winners reads like a Who's Who of the tanka world. If I had to pick the very best tanka of the whole book it would be these two from Maggie Chula:

hazy autumn moon
the sound of chestnuts dropping
from an empty sky
I gather your belongings
into boxes for the poor

and

the black negligee
that I bought for your return
hangs in my closet
day by day plums ripen
and are picked clean by birds

Full Moon Tide lives up to its title by bringing a new understanding of the Best of Tanka Splendor. Somehow it is very fitting that this book appears just as the contest has taken a new turn in its development. Since last year the contest has been conducted completely on the web but the biggest change has been to have the contestants themselves do the judging. You can see the results in Tanka Splendor 2000 or even enter the contest yourself by reading the contest rules. But before you send off your entries, you would be wise to get Full Moon Tide to see what has gone before you in the way of the tanka journey in English. This is a book to be treasured and shared with family, friends and poets of all genres.

Early Indigo, a book-length collection of tanka by Cherie Hunter Day, was awarded First Prize in the Snapshots Collection Competition 1999. Cherie Hunter Day won more than a contest - she won an editor who made a beautiful book for her marvelous tanka. There can be nothing but praise for the work of John Barlow who is producing a continuous stream of magazines for haiku and tanka as well as chapbooks and now, a full-sized bookstore-ready tome. His use of full-color covers in a small press scene that has mostly been content with black and white or colored papers immediately sets his work apart from the others.

When the reader gets past the covers, and inside the books, he or she discovers that John Barlow can be trusted to pick the very best work either to top his contests or fill his magazines. A long line is already building outside his door of authors who wish to earn his expertise with their books. Cherie Hunter Day truly deserves the honor she and her work has been given with this award. As she says in the introduction of her book, these past few years have been ones of many evenings filled with Early Indigo – the color of the sky at evening; her favorite time of the day. Though her life has been tinted with sadness in many forms, her firm grip on her skills in writing tanka give her life a surprising strength.

a long lunch -
pushing crumbs together
on the tablecloth
already this silence
between us

I loved this verse because so often people writing tanka link the emotion and the real life happening with association or concurrence. Here, she pushes crumbs together as the persons are already being pushed apart by their silences. Yet the linkage works because the opposite of any action is also a part of it. How often have you had this very experience and yet failed to see these two factors working in opposition? This device becomes even more admired when one thinks that the situation of the poem is based on conflict so to have her linkage work with conflict is even more apt. Excellent work. We all have much to learn from this book.

Satarõ Satõ (1909 – 1987), founded the tanka magazine Hodõ (The Sidewalk) in 1945 in Japan (which surely is a great story in itself) after his own first tanka collection with the same title. His later books of tanka went on to sweep the array of tanka prizes ending in 1984 with the most prestigious Shaku Chõka Prize. In honor of his work and place in the Japanese tanka community, these three persons: Motoko Matsuo (a tanka poet and member of the Hodõ group, Reiko Nakagawa (a member of the Japan Tanka Poet's Club and the Emily Dickinson Society of Japan and doctoral candidate at Kantõ Gakuin University) and William I. Elliott ( poet and translator, Professor of Kantõ Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, Director of the Kantõ Poetry Center and editor of their journal) have combined resources to bring this collection of 100 of Satarõ Satõ's tanka to the English reading audience under the title of The Spoon Clinks. The poems are presented, one to a page with the kanji along the outside edge and the romaji printed below the English.

Even as
the typhoon rages
the hen
cries out that
her egg is laid.

Taifu no
araburu naka ni
niqatori no
sanran no koe
shibaraku kikoyu.

Reading through this collection of 100 poems chosen out of Satarõ Satõ's thirteen books of tanka, one sees how far away English tanka writers are from these examples. I found myself asking if these were really his best work or if so much had been lost in translation? I do know there are many schools of tanka writing and appreciation in Japan, each with their own weak and strong points. Perhaps I am the wrong person to appreciate such flat works as:

On the endless sand
rain
and wind
alone
leave traces.

Kagiri naki
suna no tsuzuki ni
miyuru mono
ame no konseki to
kaze no konseki

The longer I read in this book, the more the work, in English, looks like haiku to me in spite of the five lines. I wish this were not so. I want a beacon of tanka writing that I can look up to, be guided by, be inspired from, and a narrow path through greening grass that makes me want to run with my arms stretched out as far as I can reach to both sides.

Baranosky brings out his newest chapbooks with the regularity of a magazine. The latest one is best described by his foreword: "This collection is mostly retrospective. "A Foot in Both Worlds", originally a 54 linked tanka series was printed in 1996, and reviewed in Small Press Review. "A World of My Own" was printed in 1993, a 108 link haiku series. "Missing Children, a 17 link haiku series, 1992, was published in a collection titled Heirloom. The title poem, "Mnemosyne", printed here for the first time, is a glosa from Eliot's "Little Gidding". Mnemosyne, memory (a Titan) is the mother of the muses. . . Mnemosyne is concerned with contextualizing experience in art, essentially serious and beneficial. Mnemosyne is the first intent, the source of meaning." The booklet is generously illustrated with artwork by Edward Baranosky.

Don't try to understand
The sweet message
Of the morning sun.
Don't apologize for being.
It's the quickest way to travel.

It tells very much about a person, how time is used, to what it is given to the day by the person who is multi-talented and yet a retired professor emeritus. Take the case of Bill West, who has great interest and knowledge of things Japanese, makes and takes great photographs, is a devotee of the brush for calligraphy and drawing as well as being capable of turning out poems in various styles. He is a book just waiting to become . . . And thus, we have three fat chapbooks filled to the full with his talents. The Heians contains a collection of West's poems dedicated to or inspired by the poems of Japanese poets of the various literary periods beginning in 550 AD to end with the Late Classical Period (1241 – 1350). To Ki no Tsurayuki (868 – 945) is dedicated:

Using the blossoms
as a cover, the lovers
speak of other things
what it is the blossoms bring,
what it is that follows spring.

Kaimami (Scenes Observed While Peeping Through a Screen) contains a series of tanka written by West but connected by the thought that they were written by a Peeping Tom in Old Japan.

Stop a moment, please,
with me behind this old screen
to escape the drafts
this dreadful winds stir up
in this house, which is not ours.

There you are! ready to see and discover almost everything possible. You can see by the examples that he writes his tanka in strict syllable count and utilizing all the possible punctuation to make it work.

The Sparrow with the Split Tongue and Beautiful Oiwa is the retelling of a Japanese ghost story in abbreviated prose. Each of these books is hand-lettered in Chancery Cursive, a skill that demands a tremendous amount of practice. Though the photographs are fitting and very fine, what I loved the most were the rather quirky drawings by Bill West that wander in and out of the pages of all three of books like distorted ghosts seeking a haven.

Writing with Multiple Intelligences: Creative opportunities for teachers, writers & therapists by Edna Kovacs, Ph.D., author of Writing Across Cultures. Blue Heron Publishing, Portland, Oregon: 2001. ISBN:0-935085-43-6. Perfect bound, 8.5 x 5.5, 204 pp., $19.95. If you have been occupied by other concerns and have failed to be informed of the newest teaching theories, plans and projects, Edna Kovacs uses her twenty-year teaching experiences to bring them together in a manageable and understandable way. For the teacher who stuck with finding a new method of getting kids to write poetry, for the writer suffering from writer's block or therapist searching for a way to open up their patients to themselves and others, Kovacs' new book offers a plethora of methods, opportunities and suggestions. Among such educational instruction and reports of experiments tried are strewn the poems of Edna Kovacs and her students. It is interesting that the book is organized around the seasons; a clue that she has some understanding of Oriental poetry. However, to credit Korea with linked poetry when it began in China and reached its heights in Japan seems rather amiss. Also, to quote from a tanka / waka by Izumi Shikibu (974?-1034) written in five lines and to call it a haiku (which only came to be written in the 1600s) suggests that another couple workshops need to be attended by this expert on poetry writing. Perhaps there is value in all this psycho-babble but you will have to tread carefully through the pitfalls.

It almost seems a European craze to publish haiku calendars with versions coming from Holland, England, Germany and now Croatia. The idea is sound. Assemble a collection of haiku from many people in many lands, arrange the ku according to the months of the year and there you are! This book goes beyond this concept by giving each haiku a day (or a day to each haiku) and leaving enough space for copious notes for appointments. But what really touched me was finding a special box at the bottom of the days for one's very own haiku. Now there is a good idea! And how easy to get inspired by the examples given from well known international authors as well as the work from new names in Yugoslavia.

This is a veritable Who's Who of Haiku, with, unfortunately, the names of many better deserving writers left out. Though each edition of this book, originally published in 1986, has had some revision and updating but it seems no one is interested in doing the comprehensive overhaul this giant of haiku literature needs to accurately reflect the width and breadth of the current haiku community. Still, if you are unable to obtain previous editions, make sure, at least, that you get this one.

Upstate Dim Sim by the Route Nine Haiku Group edited by John Stevenson with guest Poet Tom Clausen. Staple-bound, 8.5 x 5.5, 30 pp. It seems a group of haiku writers (including Yu Chang and Hilary Tann) gather at a Chinese restaurant once a month to share and discuss their haiku over excellent dim sum which, appropriately enough, translates to be "little hearts". Editor John Stevenson will publish this chapbook twice a year. You can either buy individual copies for $5.00 or subscribe for $8.00 from Stevenson at P.O. Box 122, Nassau, NY 12123.