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Encounters in this Penny World by Sanford Goldstein
Inkling Press . Order from Magpie Productions, PO Box 52014, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2TS, Canada. 88p, $15

 The cover of this book of tanka declares that Sanford Goldstein has been described as “the father of tanka in English” and I do not wish to query the rightness of that title in its literary history context other than by saying that, on this evidence, it is far more justified by his translations and his general attempts to promote the cause of tanka as a viable ‘western’ genre than by his own compositions.
  
   The book consists of ten sections that span the stages of the life-cycle, from ‘childhood’ through ‘marriage’, ‘zen’ and (the curiously-titled) ‘euphoria’, to ‘old age’, ‘illness/death’ and, eventually, ‘a summing up’. It’s a long haul. Somewhat inevitably, many of the poems present memories that I presume mean much to Goldstein but which are too subjective and, as a consequence, largely fail to produce any emotional response from this reader. Maybe that’s my shortcoming, in part, yet I expected much, much more from the book.
  
  There is no doubt that Goldstein pays careful attention to words and how they interact - check the assonance in ‘charcoal-black’ - but these poems are tanka-as-vignettes in the main and need to be far more sharply edited. Only occasionally do they hit the mark:
   charcoal-black                                   his bowling night
   those hot bloated potatoes                 and she repeats it’s all right
   deep from dug holes -                        and hurries him out;
   we forked their blistered skins            on the way he scolds himself
   and salted the dripping gold                for forgetting their twentieth

   If these are ‘confessional’ tanka then it could be said that they at least have the merit of being written in the third person. However, the lack of ‘I’ and the constant ‘he’ serves only to remind me of Julius Caesar’s imperial ‘we’, i.e. that it’s a pretentious and annoying device. In an afterword, Goldstein states that “[t]he omission of the ‘I’ leaves, I feel, the poems more as encounters, more as dramatic interludes”; but, to my mind, the opposite is the case: that the omission deprives the poems of the emotional power that tanka must have if they are to engage the reader. The section on ‘Zen’ is by far the best in the book precisely because the lack of ‘I’ is a necessity.
   on the floor                                       watching
   the master plays                                the master’s whirling whisk
   with the kids -                             in the thick green tea,
   at dinner a floating silence            she knows the power that steeps
   thicker than satori grasp               even the most fragile bowl

   The thought remains that these are tanka-by-numbers, written to serve the life-cycle motif, in the way that ‘70s prog rock bands used to construct ‘concept albums’ around grandiose themes; as if the concept of the book existed before the poems were written. The result is poems that feel contrived, unnatural, unpolished and well below Goldstein’s highest standards.