The Stream Singing Your Name, Jean LeBlanc (poetry/tanka and sijo)

Every once in awhile, I come across a book I do not want to end, that engages on many levels and invites me to re-read, to linger a bit longer. Jean LeBlanc's The Stream Singing Your Name is just such a book.

I was unfamiliar with LeBlanc's work before discovering it at the Modern English Tanka Press, but I was intrigued when I realized it contained both tanka and sijo. Sijo — pronounced shee-jo — is a classical Korean form consisting of three lines, traditionally 14-15 syllables each. LeBlanc intermingles the two forms, sometimes alternating, sometimes offering a sequence of sijo or a series of tanka, and creates a tapestry that brings out the best in each.

I find myself returning especially to her sijo. With its languid long lines, they are a beautiful foil to the emotional immediacy of the shorter-lined tanka. I have so many favorites in this collection. But on this day, I was struck by this lyrical and life-affirming sijo:

When I die, do what you have to do to make me, not of this earth,
but of these rocks, this limestone ridge. I want to feed the lichens,
anchor ferns firmly in these clefts, become my mineral self.

Whether she is writing about her students who don't distinguish between funereal and funeral, the dandelions she gives free rein every spring, her father's shoulders made strong from chopping wood or her garden in October with its

redbud leaves
and other crinkled hearts
beneath my feet

Jean LeBlanc reveals a deep regard for the world. Throughout the collection, the flow seems effortless, taking the reader from one to the next, until you arrive at the stream of the title in the final double sijo, and:

You wonder if you could just stand here, forever,
the stream singing your name around you.

Lip Prints, Alexis Rotella (poetry/tanka)

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.

Heavenly Maiden Tanka, Akiko Baba (poetry/tanka)

older now
than my mother when she died
I put my hair up!
as if this morning I am leaving
alone for a strange country

haha no yowai
harukani koete
yuu kami ya
ryuuri ni mukau
asa no gotoki ka

Akiko Baba's work is simultaneously reflective and daring, personal and universal. This tanka is a good example: it is a coming of age poem, capturing that moment in a woman's life when she realizes she is in uncharted territory. She will have to find her own way.

For more than half a century, Akiko Baba wrote tanka, the traditional Japanese form comprised of 31 syllables divided into lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Baba's work is well-known and highly regarded in Japan, but little known in the U.S. Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold, her translators and fellow tanka poets, have done us a great service by sharing 100 of her poems selected from 16 collections. I was especially pleased that they included the original Japanese, both in Romaji (shown in this post) and the original Kanji/kana.

The Romaji allows non-Japanese readers to appreciate the lyricism of the originals, and through her imagery, Baba lets the natural world speak to human concerns. She sounds many themes in these tanka: loss, loneliness, fierce independence, understanding that the universe is much bigger than we know.

coming from afar
from another galaxy
some souls
are faintly white
dogwood flowers

ginkan no
kanata yori kishi
tamashii no
honokani shiroki
yamabooshi no hana

Emily Dickinson wrote that the test of a good poem is whether it takes the top of your head off. Baba's tanka can generate that kind of visceral response. This one takes my breath away.

like snow
like leaves of a tree
as light as
the click click of collecting
the bones of my mother

yuki no yooni
konoha no yooni
awakereba
sakuri sakuri to
haha wo sukueri

In Japan cremation is customary. But fire is not absolute, as Baba reminds us. She shows us ashes in the snow, the leaves, both images of regeneration. And with the click click sound of chopsticks, we understand it is for the survivors to retrieve what remains, to honor and remember. It is an extraordinary tanka.