Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

a frayed red thread: tanka love poems: Linda Jeanette Ward. Illustrations by Jeanne Emrich. Introduction by Laura Maffei. ISBN 0-9702457-0-X. October 2000. Perfect Softbound. 64 pages. Clinging Vine Press, POBox 231, Coinjock, NC 27923. USA Orders $12 postpaid, cheques payable to publisher. Others $12 + $3 shipping (US bills only).

There’s no doubt that Linda Jeanette Ward is an accomplished writer of tanka. She featured among the winners in Tanka Splendor in both 1998 and 1999. I have no doubt of Ward’s sincerity and delicacy of feeling: qualities that are essential to a tanka writer and which are evident in a frayed red thread which seems to be her first collection. In her introduction, Laura Maffei, the editor of American Tanka, describes the long tradition of women tanka writers, such as Ono no Komachi (834 - ?) of the Heian period, with their themes of love and longing typical of their social setting. Maffei goes on to describe Ward’s poetry as echoing ancient tradition and bringing it to life in the West today. I can well understand a writer’s urge to emulate ancient tradition and to try and capture those feelings in their own life and poetry.

But how relevant are these ancient traditions to the tanka that we might be wanting to write in the West in the 21st century? Can tanka writers in the West today emulate the courtiers and courtesans of 1200 years ago by writing in a certain way? Do we really need to do that in order to communicate feelings that Maffei describes as ‘both universal and achingly personal’? There’s no doubt that it’s the communication of what is both universal and achingly personal that a good tanka does and Ward can achieve this.

But I feel the need to ask these questions because they are what I’m left with after reading through a frayed red thread a few times. What troubles me is the apparent sense of affectation which runs through this book as in: that summer/of magnolia-sweet nights/and the mockingbird’s song/we made love by -how I yearn now/to play its melody or beside my bed/gardenia in a white cup/... drinking its fragrance/through my dreams you come/heady with summer’s haze. It’s all so agonisingly soft-focus! There’s also the reverse-anthropomorphism of: trembling/ after spring’s false prom ise/ ... dear cherry blossoms/your hold on this world/as tenuous as mine and the extended haiku of In the pause/ bet u’een tick and tock - / the whisper of fog/across gray barren branches/a crow’s sudden flight the first two lines of which rather overplay the moment for this reader. I found myself longing for the harder edge, for a real sense of what the author might be actually feeling and doing. It’s there in: starry night/twinkling between the cracked slats/of venetian blinds - /irresistible/this urge to rouse you. Now that woke me up!