In the shortest
and longest
month of the year,
the chocolate I crave
is the dark bitter kind.
There are few better ways to mark Valentine's Day than with bittersweet tanka such as this and others found in Lip Prints, which contains almost three decades of Alexis Rotella's five-line poems.
Rotella is a master of the short form, whether it is haiku, senryu, or tanka, and I have admired her writing since I first discovered it in The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor Van Den Heuvel.
When reading a collection that represents a body of work, I like to put together the poet's lexicon, words that recur in various forms and that seem to carry a special charge for that writer.
Rotella's tanka are replete with stars — galaxies of stars, dandelion stars, frost stars; light — whether it is starlight, moonlight, or the light of fireflies; lace — lace curtains, Queen Anne's lace, ice blossoms and lace crystals; and the color white — white cat, chrysanthemums, gauze dress and Milky Way as well as the aforementioned dandelions, lace, frost and stars. It is a resonant lexicon, reflecting a broad imaginative and emotional range.
For example, this tanka moved me deeply:
Our white cat
gone seven years
and still
her light
in every room.
Just as Rotella describes a lover leaving a "trail of quick kisses," these tanka capture moments of experience and offer them as little gifts to the reader.
This is a collection I will return to and re-read. Unfortunately, tanka can be difficult to find in bookstores or online distributors. But the MET Press, the Modern English Tanka Press, is a great resource, offering Lip Prints as well as Rotella's surprising Elvis in Black Leather (gotta love those titles!) along with collections of many other tanka poets.
