NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This anthology of tanka edited by Brian Tasker is a delight to hold. It is pocket-sized and each tanka is printed separately on thick cream paper. The book has a nicely balanced foreword by Tasker on the history and development of tanka from its origins in Japan to the present day.

Anthologies by their nature are in some respects ephemeral literary things. A particular person or group often bases them on literary views and sets of values which sum up an attitude to the past and present held at a particular moment. But Tasker makes it clear in his foreword that

the anthology has defined itself as retrospective and as being representative of tanka development which could stand as a point of departure.

IN THE SHIP'S WAKE includes 75 poems by 60 poets from a variety of countries: some of the poets have familiar names and others are less well known. In selecting 60 modern poets, Tasker has tried to incorporate some of the styles in which tanka have been written in the West at the turn of the millennium.

Tanka, a 31-syllable lyric, made up a great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries and was the inspiration for such poetic forms as haiku and renga. This classical Japanese verse form has experienced a resurgence of interest among poets and readers during the past decade, and the five-line verse can now be seen in many varieties and styles.

Whatever its form, tanka retains the aesthetic qualities of Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during the upheaval of the last century, so tanka has undergone rigorous and vital renewal. Responding to poetic change and the movements in poetry during the twentieth century, tanka has incorporated many transformations.

Although each poem has the same five-line limit, the poets show real poetic skill in providing a panoramic exploration of such topics as fruit, owls, weeding, bird song, sailing, raindrops, and fingernails. There is spirituality in the honing of the hardest skills: word economy and word strength. These poems are a kind of exclamation of life with the five lines of the tanka dotting, exclaiming, and finishing.

The topics of the poems reach all the way from Annie Bachini's

	I walk by the park
	where we first met —
	its lamplights flicker
	as the early morning rain
	clings to the summer grass

	after the funeral
	he sleeps
	on her side
	of the bed
	winter sunlight

Which poems draw me back time and time again? Poems like David Rice's

	night sky
	in a still pool
	a tear hits the pool
	ripples carry my troubles
	to a distant star