Eucalypt 5, edited by Beverley George.  Pearl Beach, Australia.  2008.  44pp.  ISSN 1833-8186. Subscription: 2 issues – May and November.  Australia: AUD$30; Japan, India and New Zealand: AUD$35 (or US$25); US, UK, Canada and Europe: AUD$40 (or US$30).

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

In Eucalypt 5 we are repeatedly provided with eye-witness accounts of creation as the poets find it: many of the tanka are the work of poets of the outdoors, keen observers and watchers.  The poets focus on spiritual qualities, and the purpose and motivation of nature, which tends to remain elusive to the probing eye and mind.  Judith Terzi invites the readers to join her to take a close look at the seeming mystery of our earthbound existence compared with that of a bird:

scattering spirits
on cloud forests, the condor
soars majestically –
we are but grounded vessels,
no wings to cradle mystery

Michael Thorley’s poetic reality is shaped in the act of perceiving.  In his focus on the security cameras in a church he hints at a possibly larger meaning, for everything we do is seen by God, who is everywhere, and ever-watchful:

in the church
security cameras
how strange
these bother me more
than God’s all-seeing eye

The seemingly ordinary quickly loses its comfortable dullness, if one is willing to look behind the façade.  It is there that nature hides its small miracles and secrets, as we see in the following tanka by John Soules, where the moon can be hidden for a moment behind a cloud, but the pain of missing a loved one remains forever:

the moon
behind a cloud
half hidden
unlike this pain I wear
since you’ve been gone

Nature is an open book and a perpetual enigma, a source of comfort and disquiet.  Yet, the reassurance is there in the revelation that nature is ever replicating itself:

falling stars
as if the world were dying
one star at a time
replicating itself
in every pool of water

Claudia Coutu Radmore

Often the poets seem to derive their strength and inner peace from spiritual encounters that reveal a fundamental truth about life which can be felt rather than explained.  In Marian Morgan’s tanka it is nature that provides comfort and an intimation of purpose and order among the cares of this world:

across the full moon
small clouds are floating
as free as my thought –
any cares this day has sent
must wait until tomorrow.

Eucalypt 5 sets up a framework that allows for the serious as much as for the playful and ironic without compromising one or the other.  This makes for a unique vision of the world.  The tanka embrace paradoxes and contradictions that show a ready willingness to accept the world as it is and, at the same time, never to give up.  Though writing about a performer who has only recorded one of his songs, Dave Bachelor’s tanka rings true for a wider context of creativity. When he puts his poem into an envelope, we wonder: Is it his first poem?  One that he isn’t going to send?  Or a special poem written for a loved one?  We can only surmise:

a blues master
sings the only song
he ever recorded . . .
I slide my poem
into an envelope

It is part of the tanka poet’s outlook on life that all the seeming multiplicity, randomness, and insignificance of human experience belong to the same coherent order.  As Jo Tregellis notes:

six pm news
a mad parade
as always
forecast of fine skies
restores some sanity

Breaking news is a fringe phenomenon in the speaker’s world – unsettling, for sure, but the knowledge of good weather ahead restores equilibrium.

We might be worried by the danger of tanka exclusively becoming a poetry of flowers, birds, the moon and quiet evenings beside a pond, and that the safety of our small worlds belies the grave dangers that certain parts of the globe or humanity in general have to face.  But tanka poets are also able to recollect recent traumatic events in their poems.  Here is Anne Benjamin’s poem headed “after the cyclone in Myanmar . . .”

petals float
from fragrant garlands
bruised in the mire –
bearing makeshift biers
children bury children

The tanka find their own particular rhythm in the seemingly random, but with an approach, a way to focus and frame experience in such a way that readers are brought along and invited to see for themselves.  At its best, tanka builds towards an epiphany or revelation that almost takes the reader by surprise.  Having been lured by the incidental beginning and swept along by the building rhythm of sounds and images, they suddenly bear witness to some greater insight or purpose.  The homespun exhortations of Dawn Bruce’s

grey strokes
like owl wings
fill the sky . . .
your last letter
written in pencil

builds towards a dramatic conclusion that presents the similarity the poet notices between the grey strokes in the sky and a last letter with its fading pencil lines, perhaps written by a dying hand.

Yet, especially in the quieter tanka, there is always something intriguing to discover, a small revelation or miracle, a reassuring appreciation of life’s fragility, as we see in Andre Surridge’s tanka:

old ballerina
hair too thin and brittle
to take the comb
she ties it in a scarf
printed with gardenias

Here we see an aged dancer still anxious to present herself in as seemly a way as possible by tying her thin hair in a beautiful flowered scarf.

Death faces us all at some time, but Aya Yuki’s minimal tanka:

 brightness
after his death –
Takuboku’s tomb
on a hillside
facing the sea

suggests that a poet’s words live long after death and bring brightness to us all.  The poet’s last resting place being one of calmness, light and natural beauty.

Bob Lucky’s subject matter is fresh, with his usual capacity for humour:

deleting spam
I begin to wonder
who I might be –
no friends, no mortgage, no hair
short in every way

The question of “who I might be” connects the reader to the poet, for we too might be wondering who we are as we develop, change and age.

 You will come across your own favourite tanka in this collection.  You will find yourselves open to the gifts of insight, feeling, and perception offered.  Each one awaits your response, anticipates your associations and memories and will fulfill its promise of insight and significance.