Cicada Forest: an anthology of tanka, Mariko Kitakubo, translated by Amelia Fielden.  Kadokawa Shoten, 2008.  189 pp.  ISBN 978 -4-04-652019-7.  US$15.00

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Cicada Forest is a collection containing new material and selections from Mariko Kitakubo’s previous books.  With the same pleasure as at the physical presence of the book, I was drawn to Kitakubo’s exquisite examples of tanka, aptly translated by Amelia Fielden, herself a published poet and translator who specializes in the modern Japanese tanka form.

The collection is divided into four sections: New Writing, selections from I Want to Tell You in the Words of Waves (1999), selections from When the Music Stops (2002) and selections from On This Same Star (2006). The five-line tanka is an excellent vehicle for Kitakubo’s succinct cameos, her skilful use of words and vivid imagery.  The poems are beautifully presented four to a page in a bilingual (Japanese-English) format.

The first section: New Writing begins with “rounding the earth’s axis,” which features a memorable poem:

lest we stray
the Milky Way
just happens
to slip between
our entwined fingers

The light that shines through

 

remembering the day
I learned about
the supernova –
then, from a chill distance
notification of my disease

also reminds us that we are mere mortals in this vast universe and, that as well as beauty, we will also experience pain and suffering.  The linking image of mortality is given the same painful torque in

just as I
enter the straight
the inky nails
of the Grim Reaper
claw towards me

Further, in

a warm teardrop
as I awaken
from the dream
of being held back
from the brink of a cliff

reminds us of the poet’s fear of impending illness and possible death.  The threaded poems gleam, reflective and graceful despite their subject matter.  The poems work like lenses, providing glimpses into the poet’s experience, her past and her future.  Rich in allusion and imagery they provide the reader with thought-provoking images.  Such details as we see in a poem about the birth of her son made me think that Kitakubo’s voice is positive and concerned not only with personal experiences but with the wider cosmos:

one long ago summer
I bore a son
on an island
vulnerable
to stormy seas

Part 2 of the first section, “wings for my back,” insists that poetry can be written no matter one’s circumstances or where one lives.  In her Japanese environment, however, Kitakubo seems intent on describing the elements of water, crystals, ice, tears and rain:

in the midst
of this rain
they appear,
the mountain god and
the god of the stream

She considers herself to be a minute speck in the greatness of the universe:

how small
I really am
here between
a potato field
and the wide sky

The poems reveal a duality in voice, viewpoint, form and language – the one belonging to the Japanese literary genealogy of past masters of the tanka form and the other to the contemporary artist, as we see in this simple, minimalist tanka:

let me be
gentle of heart –
I so want
to live embracing
a youthful ocean

The third part of this section, “a loquat tree,” uses plain, effective language and images that deal with the themes of love, loneliness, and dignity restored through action.  In the opening poem

even rainy days
at the beach
aren’t bad,
I whisper in the ear
of a jet-black labrador

Even the rain doesn’t spoil the happiness of a walk on the beach in the company of a dog.

hey new earrings,
you who don’t know
I’ve lost my love,
bring me breezes
from the sea

A rueful love poem, is a true reflection of one’s feelings on the loss of love.  Whereas the heightened language of

the sounds
of a cat grooming itself
in Tunisia
all the cobblestones
on fire with sunset

The tanka form natural to Kitakubo makes a stunning poem of

gleaming
fish scales
swim up and away –
I too am a drop
from an ancient ocean

The next part, “letters,” focuses on the loss of the poet’s father:

like clouds
vanishing from a puddle
that morning
my father
silently disappeared

The deep impression made by this loss is apparent in

leaving me
only his shadow
father was gone . . .
I can’t recall
his fine voice

Friends, her son,

In Section Two: selections from I Want to Tell You in the Word of Waves, an
Intelligent voice speculates on friendship, her younger brother, her son, the sea and ocean, songs, and the Milky Way.  Large issues are mulled over and questioned, yet the ultimate answers often arrive in poems such as the first one in part one “dolphins glitter”:

at the end of travels
which gave me a friend,
my heart is as full
as the highest tide
where dolphins glitter

Rather than telling us how to think, the poems show us words engaged with each other and with the world mediated by a keen and attentive mind.

a meteor shower
disappears in the wind –
momentarily I,
who belong to no-one,
just stand there

I want to try
once again to believe you –
alone
in a windowless room
I’m fluttering my wings

The sureness, the simplicity, and the clean lines of these poems show the hand of a master at work.  In reading this collection, one is struck by the quality of these short poems, of which many are true masterworks of the genre.  The reader will be stopped in the moment by such poems as these from “like the myth of the stars”:

seeing you off
suddenly I recollect
the day you were born –
now in mid winter
there’s the Orion star

onto my withered heart
falls a small star –
with you
I share
a single tomato

In “the womb of Eve” we enter a timeless zone where the poems focus on nature, space, perception, attitude and, in fact, all of life when a shift or transition, however small, occurs.  It takes an experienced poet to carry off a project of this scope, and Kitakubo is equal to the task.  The tanka are filled with waves, the sea, the ocean, trees, animals, the poet’s father and her son.  As heady as this mixture is, the tanka never stray from their task of recreating the reality that surrounds us:

I let my evasive heart
play among the waves,
then baking
in the sunshine
I revive

on my closed lids
my dead father’s face
comes and goes,
but still I can’t
touch his eyebrows

The Selections from When the Music Stops begins with “between my distant past and the future” in which Mariko Kitakubo remembers times past:

it is only I
who remembers the time
when a church
stood there
on that hill?

In “eyes which watch the far horizon” the poet writes about places she has seen on the map:

how delightful are
Tanzanian place names:
‘Ngorongoro’
comes rolling
out of my atlas

 and people she has met:

is he an evil spirit
or a god,
that handsome Masai boy?
his gleaming body
has the gloss of silk

In the selections from On This Same Star, the tanka focus on the time from birth:

an accident
of birth:
on this same star
trees, wild beasts,
fish, people

to the death of the poet’s mother:

now that she’s gone
this hill path
is so long –
clutching three huge apples
I return home

Cicada Forest is a wonderful, comprehensive collection of tanka by this experienced poet.  Her life as woman, daughter, lover and mother, observer of nature and human nature, is dramatically evoked in poem after poem.