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Early Indigo, Cherie Hunter Day (Snapshot Press) 5 1/2” by 8 1/2”, 64 pages, perfect-bound with full colour cover. £8.50 postpaid from the publisher Snapshot Press, P0 Box 132 Crosby, Liverpool L23 8XS UK. Cheques payable to ‘Snapshot Press’. For sales by email: [email protected]

Cherie Hunter Day’s Early Indigo won first prize in the Snapshots Collection Competition in 1909 and is her first book-length collection of tanka. Hunter Day began writing tanka in 1993 and won Tanka Splendor Awards in 1995, 1997 and 1998. She brings a contemporary feel to the form that encapsulates the qualities of timelessness, poignancy and simplicity that can give tanka a sense of being lived for the reader. Good tanka can be measured by the subtle way your mood changes as you read them. Whether memories are being evoked as in my father cheerful - / whistling part of an old tune / over and over / from branch to branch/a chickadee comes to him and years later/in the middle of the hallway / the smell of daffodils / during her last illness / the room filled with such yellow or with that sense of idleness and lost connection that can follow domestic difficulties and is profoundly evoked in a long lunch - / pushing crumbs together / on the tablecloth / already this silence / between us and far more often / than in previous years / we argue - / I stack blue mussel shells / one inside the other.

Some of the poems that owe more to classical waka perhaps don’t work so well sincere as they are: grains of sand / slip through my fingers / uncounted / why is this loneliness / all I can remember? and overnight / a wind strips bare all the birch trees / winterbare / my thoughts too / curve gently towards heaven. If I want to read classical waka, I’d rather read the originals. The use of an adverb like ‘gently’ can also weaken a tanka by robbing the reader of the realisation. This tendency glares even more in the title poem: early indigo / entering the tidal marsh / from reed shadows / a great blue heron unfolds / its generous wings. The use of the word ‘generous’ is pointless and weakens the naturalism. I’m left with a question rather than the emotion of an image: generous to whom or in what way? Tanka need a human element and maybe the use of ‘generous’ is supposed to supply that; which illustrates the charge often levelled at tanka of sometimes being extended haiku. I prefer it when tanka put me in touch with my feelings in a genuine way which is something that tanka in general and Cherie Hunter Day in particular does so well: the room darkens / around the things you left behind/better to have nothing / perhaps then the sky / will remain a seamless blue.

Early Indigo comes highly recommended, both as a masterclass in tanka-writing (precisely because it includes weaker poems) and as a pleasure to read. You’ll want to return to it over and over again.