Heather Taylor Johnson reviews Once Poemas by Juan Garrido Salgado

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973
By Juan Garrido Salgado
Translated by Stuart Cooke

Picaro Press
ISBN 978-1-920957-39-1
Warners Bay, 2007
Order Copies from www.picaropress.com

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON

Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 (Eleven Poems, September 1973) reads like a narrative of collected single poems. Though not a verse novel, it tells the inside story of a Superpower’s super power over a democratic nation. It is not a cozy read and does not induce smiles. But it is a well written vision of a time the author does not wish us to forget and in that, it is important and it is passionate and that is enough.

It was all terror in September,
no peace in the cemeteries.
The resistance became the shadows
and the light against a war never declared.     
(7) “Made in the USA”

For most people, September 11 is a date that brings to mind New York City, terrorist attacks in the form of hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings, people jumping from those buildings as they burned to the ground. Lesser known in history, it is also the date of the Chilean coup d-etat.

With the assistance of the United States of America, Augusto Pinochet’s military killed then President Salvador Allende and created a more ‘democratic’ Chile, one in which over a hundred thousand suspected leftist dissidents would be arrested and an estimated 3,000 would ‘disappear’ or be murdered. Torture was commonplace and censorship became a way of life. Poet Juan Garrido Salgado was one of those dissidents who not only succumbed to the censoring of his poetry, but also to imprisonment and torture. His latest collection is a reminder to his readers that September 11 was a dreadful date long before 2001.

The collection begins with a poem entitled ‘Made in the USA’:

Our fiesta for socialism 
awoke a child of fear in the North. 
Chile, after all, is a long, narrow playground 
where the transnationals can frolic freely 
in the free market.

The collection comes full circle as it closes with a poem simply titled ‘September 11, 1973’, in which the words ‘Made in the USA’ stand alone between each stanza, the repetition a lamentable refrain:

Santiago, September 11, 1973, 
was a dark spring 
of terror, flames and fumes. 
Two jets 
flew like the evil wings of death. 

Made in the USA.

Soldiers in the streets formed part 
of a scaffold of violence from the sky, 
rivers of blood ran through our mouths.

Made in the USA.

I remember hearing Salgado read both of those poems only months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and I remember feeling appalled with his timing (though I had been in Australia for two years, I am a native to America and in many ways felt emotionally raw and quick to defend my country after the 9-11-01 attacks). In hindsight, I see that the timing could not have been more ideal for Salgado. His emotions, after twenty-eight years, were also raw and his need to defend his country was not up for debate. I particularly remember the fervor with which Salgado read the refrain ‘Made in the USA’, as if he could spit and cry all at once.

What lies between the pages of those two poems are nine other poems depicting the public history of Chile’s darkest days, told by a voice who claims the misery as only one personally affected can. There are instances of hope among the painful shadows, though these glimpses are often hidden and undervalued as the lingering effect is ultimately horrific. In such cases common metaphors of flight, for instance, are confused between violence and freedom, as birds take on the form of heavy airplanes and the ethereal howls of tortured men, while at the same time signifying the dreams of those who struggle against the regime. More straightforward is a second image of fire, and there is no uncertainty here. The consequences of fire are a reliable evil: the burning of humans, books, beds, souls; the burning of verses of poems, photographs of the living, the guitar of famous folk singer Victor Jara just before his death; the burning of socialism; the burning of spring; coals in the heart; coals on the skin. And in each written memory ablaze, it is impossible to disassociate Salgado from the anguish. We become his witnesses and his pupils, though he never begs our pity.

Everything was pain in September, 
the leaves condemned to cruelty 
with the words of the dictator: 
'Not a single leaf moves in this country if I do not move it.'

(11) "The Dictator's Autumn"

To add to the authenticity of the collection, the left pages contain the original poem, written in Spanish, while the right holds the English version, translated by Stuart Cooke. Salgado is himself a translator (he translated MTC Cronin’s Talking to Neruda’s Questions for Chile’s Safo Press), though the difficulty in translating one’s own life perhaps could have been a bit overwhelming. To the eyes of a reviewer who is fairly competent with the basics of Spanish, the English verse does not compare with its Spanish companion; though that is not a problem with the translation but more so with the flow of the Spanish language and the choppiness of the English. However, even if one cannot read Spanish, it is important to have the two poems side by side. Translation here can be seen to be as much about the validity of the emotion (as a poet who has not only lost his country but his language and refuses to let go of its substance) as it is about the vernacular. What jumps out for me with the side-by-side juxtaposition of the single poem in two languages is the substantiation of an identity lost.

soy todo el hombre 
en llamas por quién sabe quién. 
Secundos preciosos para este poema 
que escribo, 
que duele… 

(22) "Soy todo el hombre el hombre herido por quién sabe quién"

then the companion piece…

I am every man, 
burning for who knows who. 
Precious seconds for this poem I'm writing. 
What pain…

(23) "I am every man, the man wounded by who knows who"

This is Salgado’s fourth collection of poetry and it is no surprise that the subject matter has not veered too far from centre. If writers tend to work out their demons through words, then I expect this will not be the last reference made to political imprisonment by the poet. The strength of Once Poemas is found in the delicate mixture of the factual and the imagistic – which readers will recognise as true fodder for verse. Emotion melds together with the concrete and Salgado has managed to create a very political, very personal collection that is neither irate nor sentimental. Its directness is alarming; its use of metaphor soothing. I say it is an ardent collection, a significant work of great historical weight. Buy it, read it, place it in your bookshelf for all to see and when friends and family come around, pass it onto them. Let others know of the struggle and the pain of an earlier September 11 and of the exquisiteness of a once silenced writer set free to sing.  

Kris Hemensley reviews John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

On John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians
(Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007) 

(Originally published in Kris Hemensley’s blog, available at http://collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com  November 2008)

Such presence exists in John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007), bolstered by plenty of first person, and maybe that’s the reason it’s so pleasurable to read – first person and present tense and what I’ll record as whole sentences. Post-colonialism or Mateer’s post-colonialist reflex, is part and parcel of this book as it has always been in his oeuvre, and I’m not sorry to say that it irks me politically and poetically! Naturally, ideas and narratives are interwoven here as with every writing, so it’s almost passé to say that ultimately “attitude” doesn’t reduce the collection’s pleasure, and what provokes thought and reaction, as Mateer’s writing does, should be music to one’s ear.

Regarding whole sentences, what a relief after contemporary poetry’s inexhaustible anthology of fragment and discontinuity! I don’t, of course, mean the single words and phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought and address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter – sentences to breathe in and to hear a poet hold breath, that is nerve, as  narrator.

Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer’s non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press; the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.

It’s ten or fifteen years since I first met him, and his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way – he, a young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, had come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields – Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half-English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father’s side. We’ve talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia – agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art and artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry and poets, courteous about one’s politics and religious beliefs!

*                                                                  

“What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?” (“Anecdote”, p11) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president and now prime minister of the independent East Timor… Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo “ess” – “less”, for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual and verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.

John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One would like to say, the Noh-actor’s fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others – except that Mateer has already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand. The scenario is fraught :

The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me.
I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster.
“Welcome home,” he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart.
I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, “This is strange…”

Earlier he’d told of when they’d razed his grandmother’s house with her inside.
In the interrogation he’d been asked, “What do you think of your comrades now?”
And he had shouted back: “Every revolution has its casualties!”
But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time.

I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing.
Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?

(“Ethekweni, #1, The Poet”)

The black fighter’s belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet’s mae culpa and the poem of and as mae culpa – is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become a pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it’s only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception – typical of John Mateer’s candor – mocks the intelligence one’s want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer’s rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which the poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility.

*

John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted and natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia and South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious and lyrical interrogation of the first person and several personae.

Mention Portuguese, and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph (“I write to forget”) and every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in and out of legal and imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master – a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isn’t since spectral shivers and metaphysical speculations aren’t Mateer’s purpose. Rather, it is history and politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist – as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History and politics not so much counter-pointed by the erotic as punctuated by it – a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it’s instructive that one poem here, “Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto” (p48), isn’t about the contrast between fucking and masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese a traveller’s “gagged whispers” – and Brazilian:                   

the woman’s urging in that tongue
I love, of slurs and growls and lisping

requiring eroticism’s necessary conclusion in what should be the poet’s rhetorical question, “Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?” And history and politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism.

Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic and gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment). Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. “Composition of Unease” (p15) a perfect example :

With the deceptive ease that the Dutch
swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves,
the biochemistry in my brain catalyses
the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers
into a sensationism of memories and concepts,
the question of the composition of this unease:
For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?

Whoa!… For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers and three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden’s head? What is Mateer’s question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet’s biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West – in which case, why not dance on the monster’s grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!

The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator’s combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African’s “I, being Americanized” (“Empire”, p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it’s also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini’d cheerleaders, astroturf, moon flag)… In “The College Girl as Cypher”, she’s code for America, obviously (“bountiful college girl among bored nations”), and owns sufficient particularity

bounding along in your new sneakers,
your wit openly declared on your t-shirt

for the cliché to work – but

Desire
streamlined, sans memory

is cliché colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein’s quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era’s European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America and global modernity. Mateer’s “Americanization” is as quaint as post WW2’s “coca-cola-ization” in this time of the world wide web and the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherché a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry’s tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene’s, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!

Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (– oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind “everyone wants to be an American”, thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry’s post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesn’t distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European…) and another. Indisputable too, that Chinese and Indian have joined Japanese and Korean et al in modernity’s new imperial order, who are recognized for what they are, everywhere in the “developing world” despite the non-white camouflage… Doesn’t John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet and friend are greeted “Hey snowflakes…” (“Salutation Heard up in Harlem”, p17)? Isn’t Harlem’s ‘greeting’ the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived and attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency’s retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator’s sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere. Yet, “First Person”(p12) tenders Mateer’s identity question’s classiest pun.

Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields
as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words,
that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans.

The poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. The poet is the listener whose heart and mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line’s imagery guilelessly combines environment and occasion of vital communication and political sentiment. One’s given the crucial contradiction of the collection: listener and teller. “I have inadvertently been born as karaoke” (“Thoughts of Employment”): the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.

*

Southern Barbarians is John Mateer’s Portuguese book. I can’t remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Travelling always has this affect upon him, ‘grounding’ his rootlessness, but Portugal and the Portuguese is more than ambient here. In the previous collection, Words in the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (2006)

metaphysics funked-up by a black college band
on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre

is no more than travel-writer’s tic-tac, and there’s some of that in Southern Barbarians too. It’s what home often is –  the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist and re-engage with the questions of the world.

If Pessoa is the Portuguese book’s predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation (“I am your own surviving heteronym”, “Pessoa as Photographed Child”), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads (1572), is our own wanderer’s barely known (like all our classics) guiding star. And Portugal is where the racial and ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa and Timor, is an aroma, a taste, and a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet’s soul by politics and psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he’s confrère to the Mozambicans and Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father’s sins.

From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa –  the equal of Senghor and Césaire, and a school text in England now.

I am reliving Uncle’s poems –  They people the streets
with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas …
(“Uit Mantra”, The Ancient Capital of Images)

Tatamkhulu, the “grandfather” of the new South Africa’s African poetry. Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhulu’s ethnicity and personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhulu as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity: Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab and Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents’ death, who appeals his “white” status at age thirty and chooses “coloured”, and in later life, whilst involved in the guerrilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.

If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the “That I Might be Mexican” section in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost or Japanese, where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.

Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go…The problematised subject may always be John Mateer’s self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how and where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he’d agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu’s dictum is better than all the -isms strung together:

Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind.

(Karen Shenfeld, Books in Canada, http://www.booksincanada.com/article_view.asp?id=138).

Martin Edmond reviews Writing The Pacific

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Writing The Pacific

Jen Webb and Kavita Nandan (eds)                                                   
IPS, 2007
ISBN 9789823660165 

Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND

Margaret Bradstock reviews Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Eucalypt: A Tanka journal, Issue 3, 2007
Beverley George (Ed.)

PO Box 37 Pearl Beach 2256
ISSN 1833-8186
RRP: $30 for two issues p.a

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK   

I was impressed by the inaugural issue of Eucalypt, appearing in 2006 and positively reviewed by Jan Dean in Five Bells (vol.14, no.2, p.38). Eucalypt, the first literary journal in Australia dedicated to tanka, published bi-annually, has gone from strength to strength.According to Amelia Fielden:

Tanka, meaning ‘short song’, is the modern name for waka, ‘Japanese song’, the traditional form of lyric poetry which has been composed in Japan for over thirteen hundred years. It is an unrhymed verse form of thirty-one syllables or sound-units. There are no poetic stress accents in Japanese, so traditional poetry is given rhythm by writing to a pattern of 5/7/5/7/7 sound-unit phrases, with varying breath pauses being made when read aloud. (On This Same Star, 5)

Waka remained virtually unchanged from its inception during the Heian period through to the end of the nineteenth century, by which time it had fallen subject to stereotypical imagery and a lack of originality. Beverley George tells us:

In the late nineteenth century, several distinguished poets questioned the lack of originality and adherence to outmoded diction in the waka that were being written. To indicate their desire for reform, they renamed it tanka meaning short song or poem. The broader interpretation encouraged adoption of this genre by an expanded audience outside Japan. (10)

Tanka, then, is modern and modernised waka. Makoto Ueda’s introduction to Modern Japanese Tanka provides valuable insights into tanka reform in the twentieth century.

In English, the requisite format is more flexible still, as Fielden’s preface to her own recent collection makes clear:

In English, tanka are conventionally written in five lines to parallel the short/ long/ short/ long/ long components of Japanese tanka. Few contemporary non-Japanese tankaists adhere strictly to the original thirty-one syllable count, however. It is now generally agreed that English lyrics of around twenty-one syllables in a 3/5/3/5/5, or looser, pattern most closely echo the essential concision and lightness of Japanese tanka. This has been called the ’21 +/- theory’; it is a theory which I endorse, and my poems can usually be counted out in twenty to twenty-six syllables. More important than a specific number of syllables is the internal rhythm of tanka, the impact they make on the ears as well as the mind. And in content, contemporary tanka are unrestricted…. multiple poems – any number between two and a hundred or more – on a similar or related theme, can be grouped under a common title. This is then designated a ‘tanka sequence’. (5)

In order to contain the poetic moment within a set number of syllables, Japanese tanka rely greatly on the power of suggestion. Fielden apprises us that “a certain haziness is an intrinsic, indeed admired, characteristic of the form.”( On This Same Star, 11). The same distillation is apparent in contemporary tanka, which may sometimes seem, as a consequence, fragmentary or ambiguous. However, what is unsaid carries as much weight as the words that appear on the page. Individual tanka are not given titles, and must therefore convey meaning(s) as effectively as possible through an evocative situation.

Issue 3 of Eucalypt is arranged thematically, with topics ranging from the spiritual through family, health, celebrations of life, love and betrayal, to mention just a few. Some ‘sections’ (which segue into each other) are uniformly sad, others joyous or humorous.

The keynote poem sets the tone, matching inner and outer landscapes:

a photo
ghost gums near Kata-juta
the dry heart
too full of memories
to go back alone

    Michael Thorley (Australia)

Barbara Fisher’s delightful closing piece, reminiscent of W.H Auden’s “Thank You, Fog” (written on an afternoon too foggy to take a walk), is rife with innuendo:

lying in bed
this rainy morning
I’m glad
a walk is utterly
out of the question

    Barbara Fisher (Australia)

To my mind the wittiest of these poems, playing with the spirit of tanka without overturning it, is the following:

thirty years later
the pale blue petals
pressed in my journal
what was that flower
– and who was that man

    Margaret Chula (USA)

Likewise, a note of humour creeps into a christening ceremony:

water phobia –
the preacher pushes
her head under
bubbles floating upwards
she’s saved but terrified

    Barbara A. Taylor (Australia)

Other tanka that struck a chord, situation evoking memory and emotion, are:

Christmas time
I remember the little
ice skaters
on a mirror pond –
arranged mother’s way

    an’ya (USA)

another summer gone
not knowing
if I should eat
or store away
the sunflower seeds

    Stanford M. Forrester (USA)

how small
I really am
here between
potato field
and the wide sky

    Mariko Kitakubo (Japan)

wedge-tails
spiral overhead
in tandem
on an updraft of our own
we brush outstretched wings

    Rodney Williams (Australia)

a distant roar
of lions from the plains
father’s steady voice
telling childhood stories
by the fire’s warmth

    Maria Steyn (South Africa)

As may be noted, submissions have been accepted on an international basis, and each reflects the writer’s own country. In the January 2008 issue of Stylus Poetry [www.styluspoetryjournal.com], Janice Bostok, a pioneer of haiku and tanka in Australia, has said: “The poets of each country, while embracing Japanese forms, need to internalise their cultural origins and hope that they will become distinctive of their own country,” and this is the hallmark of tanka published in Eucalypt. Many of them exploit their own idiom, picking up on colloquial expressions, and all celebrate their native imagery and seasons. Perhaps that’s why my eye has fallen upon so many from Australia.

In an earlier article, “Tanka: ‘the myriad leaves of words’” (11), Beverley George elaborates further:

A convincing argument for the adoption of tanka into foreign utterances lies in this form’s versatility. A tanka poem can capture the essence of human emotion and it can also be demonstratively used as a form of diary writing to chart the more pedestrian aspects of our lives, as well significant events. (p.11)

In Eucalypt # 3, George is to be congratulated on another fine and representative selection.

NOTES

Modern Japanese Tanka: An Anthology, edited and translated by Makoto Ueda. NY: Columbia UP

(1996):