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The second of three Cormoran Strike novels, The Silkworm is the weakest of them, though perhaps that’s because I read Career of Evil prior to this and some of the tension that’s built up outside of the central plot in The Silkworm is undermined by knowledge of what happens in book three.

The Silkworm is still good crime fiction though. I did find the plot a more convoluted than book one or three and perhaps a tad unrealistic but to tell you the truth I enjoy having the killer revealed to me this time almost as much as I like trying to figure out who had done it.

If you enjoy reading about the rather cloistered world of traditional publishing and don’t mind a few swipes at the self-publishing market the The Silkworm certainly hits the required tension of a well paced crime thriller.

Despite knowing what happens to the main characters in book three, I still found Rowling’s characterisation enjoyable. I love the subtle sexual tension between Cormoran and Robin and the depth of characterisation provided.

I was unwell for most of the reading of this work and found just participating in the story enough of a buzz to keep reading.

It’s not necessary to read these books in order, they do stand well on their own. But as I have remarked previously, the best thing about the series is its central characters and their growth.

Great holiday reading.

How much you enjoy this work will depend I think on your individual path to Haiku, whose translations you may have read first and your own experience and perhaps practice of English language haiku.

I find that I have a preference for the translations that I am most familiar with and so Miura is at a disadvantage for a great number of the included classic master’s (Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki) Haiku that I had experienced previously.

That’s not to say that there weren’t a number that I thought (and could still change my mind on) were interesting additions. Compare the following:





Calm and serene

The sound of a cicada

Penetrates the rock.

- Basho (trans. Miura)



Lonely silence,

a single cicada’s cry

sinking into stone

- Basho (trans. Hamill)



What was a welcome addition to my reading and knowledge was the inclusion of lesser known (in the West at least) but still historically significant later masters like Kyoshi, and Dakotsu:



A woman

Taking a bath in a tub

Is coveted by a crow.

- Kyoshi

The 100 or so haiku are set out in seasonal format, including a section on New Year’s. Each poem is written in English, Romaji and Japanese script, one poem to a page with attendant calligraphy or sumi-e painting. When a poet’s work is introduced a short biographical note is attached.

Though by all means easy for a novice to read, I do wonder if this work might provided more interest for someone with a fair bit of Haiku reading under their belt. A worthy addition to your Haiku collection, though perhaps not a must have.

It’s perhaps a sign of how divorced from the larger Australian culture poetry is, that I missed Philip Hodgins’ rise and impact on the scene.

The accolades don’t seem to gel with my experience: - “one of the major poets of his generation”, “a leading poet in any terms”.

I knew nothing of him until two years ago. And in my work as a relief teacher I have not once come across him being studied in classrooms (a crying shame considering the content and variety of his form).

This is not a criticism of the poet nor of the scene. It is, I think the times we live in and they way that poetry survives as an art form in this country.

While much of Hodgins works can be viewed for free at the Australian Poety Library, First Light gives the reader the chance to hold a curated collection in their hand. Something that’s suprisingly hard to do (there’s only one copy of one collection in the entire South Australian Library system)

I had searched the country for second hand copies of his Selected Poems to no avail. That First Light is produced by an American publisher is also curious for a poet that is held with such high regard.

I am, however, an unabashed fan and although I think we may have had some differences of opinion on some things, he is my favourite Australian male poet. I have read a library copy of New Selected Poems and in comparison First Light does as good a job of showcasing Hodgins’ best work: the skill with which he uses form and free verse, his updating of the realities of farming life in the poetry cannon and his poems on the subject of his own death.


I think any serious Australian poet should know of Philip Hodgins, particularly any one writing of a rural experience. First Light is a good compact collection that I think would appeal to lovers of more traditional form, rhythm and rhyme as well as free verse.

This is the second volume I have read edited by Joyce Chng who shows a talent, along with Jaymee Goh, for selecting quality work and writers.

The Sea is Ours – Tales of Steampunk South East Asia quite directly presents itself as Steampunk. I want to say though, that it’s a bit more than that. It’s quite easy to dismiss Steampunk in general as a sub-genre that’s been overworked.

From very early on in my reading though, it was apparent that The Sea is Ours, had greater depth. Here’s what I wrote via a Goodreads update nearly halfway through the reading:

An intriguing selection that is reminiscent of Alternative Alamat in some ways. This is steampunk, but where that might cause potential readers to roll eyes and think "not another clockwork collection", The Sea is Ours is much more South East Asian alternative history and is all the better for it. The steampunk is subtle in most cases and where it isn't it’s original.

Collections like the The Sea is Ours is what I think of when talking about diversity in genre. Each of the stories contained brought a new angle or a fresh perspective on some old tropes.

But ultimately what excited me was the stories and characters of South East Asia. In and age long past half my history major was on Ancient South East Asian history, so for me The Sea is Ours brings back memories and adds additional threads to the tapestry of my experience.

Steampunk can feel “bolted” on a times, a cliché, but what I found with each of these stories was a much subtler integration into both story and culture. In some stories the technology arrives from outside the narrative’s culture and it’s adapted, in others it forms an integral part.

There’s also a good balance of the mythic and fantastical, Alessa Hinlo’s, The Last Aswang, and Timothy Dimacali’s On The Consequence of Sound, immediately spring to mind. Each author brings something fresh to this work though and for a collection that has its fair mention of airships and automatons, The Sea is Ours delivers variety in the type of story as well.

This is a fresh and original collection that reworks Steampunk in interesting ways while showcasing talented authors who present us with the reworked and reimagined stories of their own cultures and traditions.

Alter your perspective.



This is a review copy offered by the publisher.

I previously reviewed The Haiku Anthology by Cor van den Heuvel, Haiku in English is perhaps best seen as a companion collection to it.

Some of the content is duplicated in each volume but they both have different objectives.

The former is a third edition of mainly North American Haijin (the third edition IIRC dropped some important early contributors like Janice Bostok from Australia) and it tends to provide a number of poems from prominent Haijin, enabling the reader to get a real sense of each poets oeuvre. I believe Cor attempted to choose the best examples of the form he could.

Haiku in English broadens the field of poets to include European, UK and Australian Haijin (current and historical) and attempts to reflect the history of the form, showcasing proto-English Haiku at the beginning and highlighting experiments in short poetry that stem from this Japanese form.

Indeed the jacket copy calls it “the first anthology to map the full range of Haiku in the English tradition”. So, as the editors forewarn in their foreword, it’s not a collection of the best of the best in the form. Which is not to say that those haiku selected are deficient in any way.

Where a Haijin may have made an impact or pursued a variation to great enjoyment and success, only selected poems have been chosen to illustrate the achievement. Some poets only have one Haiku listed and it may not be that which is considered best from their body of work, more that it might illustrate an important step in the tradition.

To that end Haiku in English is more about the form and its English history than individual poets or groups of poets.

We begin with Pound’s:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Examine parts of Wallace’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

Amoung twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird

and then it’s more or less off into more familiar Haiku territory.

There’s some 800 poems here including those from many top poets still active in the form. The collection is capped off with a comprehensive historical essay by Jim Kacian, which in conjunction with the various introductions collected in The Haiku Anthology, serve to preserve the history of the form and the important achievements of its Haijin.

There is a very real danger that due to a lack of interest from the core of Western poetry tradition (despite works being included from Heaney and Collins) that much could be lost. This collection serves to head off this possibility.

Haiku in English should form part of a core reading cannon in anyone seriously attempting the form. There’s also sufficient variety in the Haiku selected, that as a reader of The Haiku Anthology I don’t feel as though I have paid for the same material.

Haiku in English is currently available in hardback, though a paperback version is slated for release in January.

Career of Evil is the third Cormoran Strike novel. I wouldn’t call it a series but I do think there’s some tangible benefit to reading them in order – if only to see the main characters development in sequence.

Don’t let this put you off grabbing it in the airport lounge, if you are looking for a good solid read on a long haul flight; it’s a thoroughly engrossing read.

I don’t regularly read crime (I do enjoy the genre in TV & Film) but that’s more a result of the type of reviewer I have become. I’ll read anything that’s well written.

And Career of Evil, is exceedingly well written and paced as one might expect from Rowling. The delivery of the story is smooth but what I really enjoyed in Career of Evil, beyond the problem solving goodness of a well written crime thriller, was the choices in character development.

I imagine in a field as well dug over as Crime Fiction, that it’s hard to not rehash plots and types of killers, so the only real area for freshness is in the characters and the drama/ tension that exists between them.

I particularly enjoyed Robin’s (Cormorant’s Assistant/Partner) story arc, indeed I feel as though Career of Evil ended up being more about her than Strike. I don’t want to give too much away but I did feel that Rowling made some very good choices that showed Robin to be a character with psychological depth. There’s quite a few places where I felt Robin’s character could have slipped into stereotype, but Rowling’s choices present Robin with a good mix of vulnerability and strength that make her feel solidly fleshed out and real.

Career of Evil is a clever, well paced Crime Thriller that should keep you glued to the page. You’ll love the characters (especially if you have read the other two books) and this character development paired with smooth delivery of a well articulated crime thriller will have you hankering for the next one. It’s no surprise that there’s a TV series in the works.

The review copy was provided by the publisher.

I always enjoy Ken Liu’s work, whether it’s translations like The Three Body Problem or his own short work and it’s been interesting from a writers point of view to observe the difference in style between short works, translations and now a longer work in the form of The Grace of Kings.

To get a sense of what Liu presents I’ll quote an answer he gave on The Quillery blog:

The Grace of Kings is a re-imagining of the rise of the Han Dynasty in a new, secondary fantasy archipelago setting. This is a foundational narrative for Chinese literature much as the Iliad and the Odyssey are foundational narratives for the West.

By re-imagining this story as an epic fantasy using tropes and narrative techniques drawn from Chinese and Western epic traditions, I’m trying to create a new, blended aesthetic that transcends the Orientalism and colonial gaze that tends to hobble many “magical China” narratives.

The first book in The Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings charts the rising fortunes of two friends Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu against an epic backdrop of an empire in decline. My knowledge of Ancient Chinese history is limited, perhaps even non-existent; the only points of reference are computer games set in the Warring States period and Wuxia films where the details seem to blur. That being said there is a similar feel in the focus on heroes as agents of change, and rising and falling fortunes that have far reaching effects.

There has been some comparison made with the epic nature of A Song of Ice and Fire Series by Martin and here is where I feel that there’s a bit of a stylistic difference worth commenting on.

Martin tells a tale by having a larger number of point of view characters and we get to witness the building of the world through their eyes. This results in long books and lots of them.

I think Liu achieves the same effect with a more limited focus on character, for sure there are a number of point of view characters but not as many and the world is sketched in a way that I want to say resembles the best creatively presented history books.

I had to borrow The Grace of Kings from the library and so can’t lay my hands on the text to give you an example.

What I am trying to articulate, perhaps poorly, is that we are given a story and a comprehensive historical and cultural artefact. To that end I didn’t find the writing as immersive in a narrative sense as I usually do with Liu’s short work, but I don’t particularly care because the world building balances that out.

There were other points of interest that tickled me intellectually: the inclusion of poetry that was not merely window dressing but that sat nicely in the cultural aesthetic that Liu was presenting, the presentation of interesting roles for women including but not limited to an extremely capable General, and some very light feminist commentary.

I enjoyed the tale and the world presentation. It has elements that I am sure will tick a number of boxes for people, pitched battles, airships, and legendary heroes. It’s fresh and I think Liu has managed to hit the targets he was aiming for in the quote above.

I have friends who are enamoured of this book, I bought it at the Adelaide Writers Festival after hearing Crummey read an excerpt during an interview with Margo Lanagan.

If authors want to sell books, develop some public reading skills and choose your passages wisely. Crummey reeled me in hook, line and sinker.

He read (in a faint Newfoundland accent if I recall) a selection of pages from near the beginning of the novel; a dying whale washes up on the shore and the townsfolk set about harvesting it. Cutting it open they discover the body of a naked man, determined to give him a Christian burial…

Mary Tryphena’s father lifted the corpse by the armpits while James Woundy took the legs and the sorry little funeral train began its slow march up off the landwash. There were three stone steps at the head of the beach, the dead man’s torso folding awkwardly on itself as they negotiated the rise and a foul rainbow sprayed from the bowels. James Woundy jumped away from the mess, dropping the body against the rocks. —Jesus, jesus, jesus, he said, his face gone nearly as white as the corpse. Callum tried to talk him into grabbing hold again but he refused. —If he’s alive enough to shit, James Woundy said, he’s alive enough to walk.

It has taken me about two years to get around to reading it though, plenty of time hopefully to let the praise settle, to let the initial excitement fade. It’s a prize winning book but I wanted to approach it as cleanly as possible.

So what is Galore?

It’s a story of people and place, the families Devine & Sellers chiefly and the community and locale of Paradise Deep, Newfoundland.

So it has elements of a family saga set in a remote and bleak locale, in a time of changing attitudes and mores. Not perhaps a book that you want to read if you are searching for an uplifting experience.

In terms of narrative fulfilment I was left feeling a little unsatisfied at the end of what seemed like a long tale. The nature of the book, its focus on family members over the period of a couple of generations made it hard to really form strong attachments to characters. That and a lot of the characters were not particularly likeable. They live a bleak and oppressed existence on the edge of starvation for much of the book.

Still that being said, it was an immersive experience, the characters were tangible, the place and tone bleak and depressing in a thoroughly enjoyable way. I was absorbed.

There are elements of magical realism, ghosts and shades that are interacted which I found no objection to, having come largely from a fantasy/science fiction background, there’s also an echo of biblical allusion – a family member cut from the belly of a whale and called Jonah.

You may note too from the excerpt above that Crummey eschews the use of quotation/speech marks using a dash instead. It was an interesting choice, but didn’t really cause any issues once I got used to it.

It’s been compared by some to The Shipping News and tonally I’d say they were similar, neither perhaps an advertisement for Newfoundland but they are both very distinct in their representation of people and place.

I enjoyed Crummey’s writing enough that I’d pick up another work of his.

Taneda Santoka was a tragic figure - his mother and brother suicided, his father squandered the family fortune and Taneda himself battled an alcoholism that he knew had the better of him.

This tragic life, Burton Watson suggests, is part of the reason he is reserved a place in Japanese literary history (the Japanese apparently have an appreciation for those that mess up their lives completely) the other is his contribution to and continuing development of, Japanese Free Verse Haiku (Haiku without Kigo and syllable restriction).

For All My Walking is a collection of Taneda’s daily diaries and the Haiku he wrote, including travels that he intended would echo Basho's own . The Haiku are presented in chronological order and when taken from published collections Watson notes this. Interspersed between the Haiku are diary entries which Watson has included to give some context to the poems and to give us a sense of the poet.

In that regard I find similarities with earlier works such as Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior but perhaps this owes something to Watson’s arrangement rather than the intention of the poet ie Watson’s selections create a narrative whereas Basho creates his own.

Basho is more reserved and in the main directs his gaze outward. Taneda’s diaries seem to focus more heavily on himself, his battle with alcoholism and his struggle to maintain a living.

In presenting the Free Verse Haiku Watson has this to say:

My own interest in Santōka’s work centers more on the poetry itself, particularly the manner in which it experiments with different poem lengths and syntactic patterns, and the challenge that these present to the translator. Since free-style haiku do not adhere to the conventional 5–7–5 sound pattern, the translator is free to break them more or less wherever he or she wants or, like Hiroaki Sato in his translations of Ozaki Hōsai’s free-style haiku, to translate them as a single line in English. I have regularly broken my own translations into two or three lines in the hope that this division will help readers grasp the syntax of the poem and slow down the reading.

Modern Japanese in nearly all cases requires more syllables or sound symbols to express a given idea or image than does modern English, and so English translations of Japanese haiku, if not deliberately padded, will almost inevitably turn out to be briefer in wording than the originals. And when confronted with a poem such as Santōka’s haiku “oto wa shigure ka,” one comes out with something looking like this:

that sound

the rain?

My initial impression of the Haiku were that they felt a bit flat. By the end of the book, whether it was through sympathy with Taneda or familiarity, I did gain some appreciation. He reads at times like English Language Haiku (possibly because of the lack of Kigo or allusion) or perhaps I should say that some English language Haiku start to resemble Taneda’s work.

I can’t help but feel though that the change from Traditional to Free Verse Haiku would be more keenly felt in the original Japanese and that in translating, quite a lot is lost. Take for example the beautiful sound that the poem above makes in Japanese, which owing to its brevity can’t really be replicated in English.

Taneda can be extremely self involved at times and at others he captures what is going on around him in reverent detail:

July 11, 1938. Today is the day the ashes of the dead soldiers arrive. I caught the 10 o’clock bus to Yamaguchi…. At Yamaguchi Station, a guard of honor, families of the deceased, onlookers standing around under the glaring summer sky, waiting, myself among them. Hot, hot! Now and then, spatters of rain, like tears from the sky.

A little past twelve the train arrived. Ah—two hundred and thirty or forty some dead, a “triumphal return” with no hurrahs, a pitiful scene. Alongside the white boxes, two or three memorial bunches of bellflowers, two or three pigeons appearing, circling in the sky above. Sounds of muffled weeping, muted volley of rifles, sad notes of bugles, as the procession moves solemnly through the crowd, taking the dead men back to their home unit.

213

(“Home Front”)

valiantly—that too

pitifully—that too

white boxes



214

(“Home Front”)

drops of sweat

plop-plopping

on blank white boxes



215

(“Home Front”)

town festival

as bones

coming home for it?



216

(“Home Front”)

scarecrow too

bravely waving

the Rising Sun flag

Taneda is still popular in Japan today, so I think that in addition to suggesting he be read to improve a Haiku poet’s historical knowledge, there’s an argument to be had for studying the work of someone who must surely still have an effect on the writing of modern Haiku.

Note I am using the term syllable loosely here to represent the Japanese symbol sounds

I recall Lisa L. Hannett writing about the Australian Gothic in Wide Open Fear, a piece for her column in This is Horror. Trent Jamieson is part of that cultural/ literary trend in Australian genre writing and his previous short works and his Death Works series make valuable contributions to a cohort of writers and writing that holds its own internationally.

Then comes Day Boy , which I think might be the finest book Trent Jamieson has written to date, and perhaps the finest articulation of Australian Gothic in a single novel yet. There’s elements of his Nightbound Land Series, the imagery and the tone, but its subtle and more powerful for that. There’s a strong voice (haunting in its poetry) that firmly pins you down to this nightmarish world and makes you believe.

DAIN SAYS WE fight to breathe. We fight to be born and forever after we’re all rage at the brevity of the world and its multitudes of cruelties. I’m not sure about that. But we fight. And we Day Boys fight like we’re men angry and sanguine. Little soldiers marking doors with chalk, sketching the seven-pointed Sun upon the wood. Working and walking, all strut and talk—until we fight. And then the talk doesn’t matter anymore.

Writing good, entertaining stories is difficult in itself, writing stories that work one subtler levels at the same time is a sign of craft and this book is a work of well honed crafting. You could say that Day Boy is a tale of post-apocalyptic Australia ruled by vampires as seen through the eyes of one of it’s yet- to-be masters and you would not be wrong but you’d be missing much: Jamieson’s artistry at bending well used genre tropes to his will, his explorations of relationships between fathers and sons (even if they are proxies), about the relationship or tension of living with the Australian environment (even in its post apocalyptic state) and about loving, losing and growing up.

It’s a work that the Australian Speculative Fiction community needs to notice not just because its a fine rendition of what one of our best writers is capable off, but of what can separate Australian writers from a homogeneity of genre tales internationally. I commend Text Publishing for publishing it, for recognising why it’s an important tale and for perhaps exposing it to a slightly different audience.

Buy it or borrow it. Just don’t miss it.

My first experience with Robert Frost and this poem was being on the receiving end of a year 12 English Curriculum. Thankfully it was delivered by someone who had an appreciation of poetry and how to impart it to 17 year old teens in the middle of Australia. While not my favourite Frost poem, The Road Not Taken was among those studied.

From that point on, despite quite liking Frost’s work, I haven’t really sat down to give The Road Not Taken,a close reading since that time. I like many others probably remember its central message as being about taking the road less travelled, about not going along with the flow.

Here it is to jog your memory or if it’s your first time, to enjoy:



The Road Not Taken



Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;



Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,



And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.



I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.



Source: The Poetry Foundation

So what do you think? Is this what the poem is about? It’s generally accepted amongst learned folk that to read it as a tribute or paean to American Individualism is a misreading of the poem and indeed some of Frost’s comments on the poem suggest that he thought folks took it too seriously. Orr’s claim :

The poem isn’t (with all due respect to can-do individualism) a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the
story of our own lives.

He then goes on at considerable but interesting length to interrogate this idea. Orr’s approach is an interesting one. First he tackles Frost himself, as the man and as the constructed national treasure. I found this section while no means a biography, a good summary of the man and how he presented himself to the public.

Frost seems to exist in the public consciousness as some sort of folksy farmer sage spreading simple home truths when the reality is perhaps more interesting and more constructed. I come away from this section of the book having great admiration for Frost’s ability to generate authenticity.

Orr then moves on to the poem itself where he kindly lets us know that the confusing nature of this poem even tripped up the good friend and poetry critic Frost based it on. Essentially though this chapter is a close reading of the poem pointing out particular word choices or lines that support if not a different meaning than the poem is assumed to have, then raising doubt in the reader’s mind. Take for example the title of the poem: The Road Not Taken. It was originally titled Two Roads but it’s frequently misremembered as The Road Less Travelled. What was Frost trying to get the reader to contemplate right from the beginning? This is perhaps my favourite section.

The book could have stopped here and still have been a worthwhile read but Orr then goes on to discuss The Choice and The Chooser in subsequent sections. The former section is a significant investigation of choice or choices, how we make decisions and quotes scientific research on the process. If this section presents an examination of the process, The Chooser examines the different selves possible/present in the poem.

Finally Orr leaves us at the Crossroads, quite literally with - Epilogue: The Crossroads. Here we are left to contemplate, perhaps deeper than we have before the nature of choice and ourselves, in that most literally liminal of places – the moment before we decide our direction.

So is the The Road Not Taken. for everyone? It’s certainly not an academic text i.e. one aimed at other academics. You’ll want to perhaps have some interest in poetry and perhaps Frost himself. That being said if you love language and literature this is such a smooth flowing and engaging read I think you’d enjoy it anyway.

This review was based on an ARC copy.

How do you judge a memoir? Are we judging the quality of the writing or making value judgements on the life displayed within? Both?

Looking purely at its technical aspects Not My Father’s Son was exceedingly well structured. The writing fits with Cumming’s public persona - it’s lively and cheeky and witty but not silly. Above all I’d say it feels honest and perhaps that’s what enabled it to get under my guard. I wouldn’t say that I am a fan of Alan Cumming but I have certainly enjoyed his work since first seeing him in Circle of Friends.

I read Not My Father’s Son without any forewarning as to the contents, I hadn’t seen the episode of Who Do You Think You Are referred to in the book. If I had to pin down what piqued my interest I’m not sure I could tell you, other than having seen him recently on Australia’s Book Show and thinking to myself that he’d be an interesting character to read about.

So the fact that he starts with the physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by his father came as a little surprise. That’s not to say that it was structured this way as to hook in the reader, more I think that Cumming decides from the outset that you, the reader, are going to get the truth straight up.

Despite its rather harrowing content, it felt like it had the pacing of a page turner. Sure, famous peoples lives can be interesting, can fulfil a morbid curiosity but I don’t think it was some perverse voyeurism that kept me glued to the ereader screen.

Not My Father’s Son, is billed as a family memoir. This is an apt description, for though it focuses on Alan’s early life and his abusive Father, it also investigates and interrogates( with help from the Who Do you Think You Are program) the death of his maternal Grandfather. Cumming switches between childhood,the present and the near past weaving three parallel narratives together and finishing with a heart warming conclusion.

It’s part catharsis, part historical mystery. If it weren’t true I don’t think the events that stretch across generations and families would be believable in fiction.

I had an idyllic childhood by comparison. That Alan Cumming was still here to write and reveal this story is a testament to his spirit and humanity.

Haiku were traditionally the purview of men in Japanese culture. Educated women of court wrote the longer and more lyrical Tanka but Haiku developed from the starting stanza in longer linked poems that were composed at social gatherings held for that purpose. Generally speaking the women served and performed hostess duties at these gatherings rather than participating in the creation of poetry.

In Far Beyond the Field, far-beyond-the-fieldhowever, Mokoto Ueda demonstrates that Japanese women have been present from the very beginning of the form, writing contemporaneously with some of the noted Masters. In this collection Ueda has compiled 400 Haiku of some 20 poets in a selection that gives the reader a substantial survey of the field from the 1630’s to the present day.

Ueda also noted that in terms of gender, the field of contemporary Haiku poetry is dominated by women poets (some 70%) though men do still fill the majority of roles as critics and anthologists.

Having read a fair amount of Basho, Issa, Buson and Shiki the most striking difference I observed is in the content. Sure there are nature sketches, observations of the world and people’s general interaction with it but it doesn’t seem to matter what period the female poets are drawn from, there is a strong focus on women’s concerns and the oppression they feel. Read more at myblog

If Haiku are observational and sparse, understated in their emotion, detached from the poet’s ego – then I find that Tanka are almost their opposite.

With Tanka the poet expresses their emotion, asks questions directly of the reader(or themselves) and layers emotional imagery that can seem to explode off the page (particularly if you have only been reading Haiku). Indeed at times while The Ink Dark Moon, I found these poems from 8th-10th Century Japan more akin to the overtly emotional work of the western Romantics (albeit in shorter form).

I thought to pick

the flower of forgetting

for myself,

but I found it

already growing in his heart



Ono no Komachi

So the The Ink Dark Moon presents some of the translated works of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu two of Japan’s greatest practitioners of the Tanka form. They wrote during the Heian era, the only period of Japanese history where female poets appear to have been able to rise to the height of their art and have been regarded as literary geniuses.

The book offers a substantial introduction, placing both writers in their historical context. The poems themselves are presented in two sections, Ono no Komachi’s work preceding Izumi Shikibu’s.

Now while Haiku and Tanka poets have been known to write poems in the tens of thousands the translators have offered a (comparatively) modest and reasonably digestible collection here - I gave up counting the number of Izumi Shikibu’s at around 60 Tanka.

At times the poems are presented with head notes (particularly if its a poem responding to lover or unique set of circumstances) and at times they are left to be read as is. There is, however, a substantial notes section that provides the Romaji version of the poem and any other interesting facts.

The Ink Dark Moon is rounded off nicely with, On Japanese Poetry and the Process of Translation, which discusses some of the issues and choices translators make when translating from Japanese to English.

What is apparent, on reading either poet, is that the Tanka form with its focus on passion and love, requires less background knowledge to fully appreciate, than say Haiku. There’s significantly less to be read into the poet’s intent or meaning.

Why haven’t I

thought of it before?

This body,

remembering yours,

is the keepsake you left.



Izumi Shikibu

I found The Ink Dark Moon to be both interesting from the point of beginning to understand Tanka and the history around the form but I was also moved by the poetry. It’s must have for anyone interested in writing in the Tanka form, and a delight for those readers who enjoy the poetry of love and emotion.