Another Garden: Tanka Writings

Readers of Another Garden will enjoy its generous yet compact presentation of modern tanka in all of that genre’s rich variety. Jeffrey Woodward, innovative poet, editor and critic, has assembled a selection of his best individual tanka, tanka sequences and tanka with prose. The book is rounded-off by the inclusion of two influential essays, The Road Ahead for Tanka in English and The Elements of Tanka Prose, and of an in-depth interview with the author, Tanka Prose, Tanka Tradition.

Behind the lines of Jeffrey Woodward’s tanka prose, in pieces like The Silence That Inhabits Houses, with its meditation on a painting by Matisse, or The Trial of Dorothy Talbye, 1638, and its description of the ‘wild and unexplored interior’ of Salem, is a canny, exultant understanding and possession of the mind and heart that is rare in prose and prized in poetry. Woodward’s voice tills his subject matter with thought, imagery and language that mark the mastery of his craft and the authority of his vision. His contributions to tanka and tanka prose literature are foundational, a glory to read and savor. Here is rich ground with roots in it. -Michael McClintock, President, Tanka Society of America (2004-2010)