Written by Jo McInerney, as a fellow member of the editorial team here at Catchment, the following discussion of tanka as poems of place (both in traditional and contemporary contexts) is intended to broaden understanding about this Japanese-based poetic form.
Releasing this new essay is also aimed at complementing a previous evaluation of the longer poem-of-place ‘Warning’, written by Ali Cobby Eckermann.
That initial essay in this series of Catchment Views was posted on 21 March 2025, so as to coincide with the opening of the current submission period, towards our fourth edition.
While likewise aiming to promote reflection on poems which focus on location, this second essay also hopes to encourage poets to offer contributions across the coming month, both in tanka and in longer forms, with submissions set to close on 21 May.
Best wishes with your reading and writing,
Rodney Williams
Editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place
Tanka of place: linking and shifting
Welcome to the second in a series of articles to be published in Catchment – Poetry of Place. This discussion will make some general observations about the tanka form. Three tanka will be considered, the first from Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled around 759 AD. The second and third pieces are by contemporary Australian tanka poets.
Tanka is a distinct yet flexible form with specific features that heighten its impact. I will try to illustrate some of these features here. For readers already familiar with the general points made, I hope you enjoy the tanka presented, whether old friends or new.
haru sugite
natsu kinikerashi
shirotae no
koromo hosu chō
Ama no Kaguyama
spring has passed by
summer has come it seems
cool white linen robes
are spread to dry they say
on heavenly Kagu Mountain
Written in the late 7th Century by Empress Jitō, this tanka is the second in Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves. Both the original and the translation (by Laurel Rasplica Rodd) are written in tanka’s usual five-line form. The first two lines focus on the changing seasons, with a gentle sense of impermanence, a feature of much Japanese verse.
Tanka generally have a bifold structure with each of the two component parts playing off each other in a way sometimes described as link and shift. The link (tsukeai) refers to the connection between the two elements and the shift (tenji) to the difference or the way one section progresses from the other.
The simultaneous link and shift occur in this first tanka across lines two and three with the reader’s attention drawn from the seasonal change noted in the first two lines to the human activity taking place in lines three and four.
In ancient Japan, it was customary to air out white garments at spring’s end. The human action is triggered by the seasons but also reflective of them, with the white fabric strewn on the mountain echoing the now departed mists of spring and the melted snow of winter. The interconnection between human and natural worlds is implied throughout.
This tanka is very much one of place. Opening with seasonality, temporal location, it concludes with geographic and spiritual location – ‘on heavenly Kagu Mountain’. Mount Kagu is considered a sacred mountain in Shinto beliefs, often depicted as a link between earth and the heavens. The mountain is in the Yamato region, the ancient heartland of Japan. It serves as an ideal setting for a tanka treating the passage of time and rituals of human renewal.
The second tanka we will be considering is one by Australian poet Gavin Austin. Note again the five-line form, though used differently here.
nothing blooming
in the winter garden
another bed
with freshly tucked corners
waiting in palliative care
(A Hundred Gourds 5:1 December 2015)
This tanka reveals its full significance gradually, detail building on detail.
Like Empress Jito’s, it has an immediate sense of season, its first line indicating – ‘nothing blooming’. The reader imagines a barren landscape, perhaps too cold or dry to sustain flowers.
The second line supplies a more specific setting – ‘in the winter garden’. The image is bleak. Even in winter there are blooms that defy the lack of warmth and light – lavender, daphne, paper daisies. Why, if this is a garden, has nothing been planted to bloom through meagre months?
As often in tanka, line three acts as a pivot, though its function is not immediately obvious. ‘Another bed’ at first seems to give the reader an opportunity to observe a different response to the winter chill, perhaps a flowerbed offering welcome colour or scent. However, line four reveals this was a misdirection. The description is curious. This other bed does not have freshly turned earth, but ‘freshly tucked corners’.
It is only in the final line that the reader fully recognises where the piece occurs and the significance of its setting. This empty bed is (with its observer) ‘waiting in palliative care’. The final line is confronting. The poem presents an emotional state as much as a physical location. Indeed, it gains greatly from the particularity of its physical and personal situation, neither of which derive from a geographically unique locality. The observer recording the scene has suffered a loss. He is standing before a vacant bed where recently someone was holding on to what little remained of life. The flowerless garden, perhaps observed through the ward window, suggests the emptiness the speaker feels as much as the diminished state of the natural world.
There is scant comfort offered here. Empress Jitō’s tanka moves from spring to summer, each seasons of growth. Austin’s tanka seems locked in winter, the poem suggesting a cycle of death without the prospect of regeneration. The ‘freshly tucked corners’ reveal the bed has been prepared for another occupant likely to die there.
The immediacy of the grief suggested in this tanka (the bed has only just been remade) allows for the possibility of later comfort and healing, just as the reader knows the ‘winter garden’ will ultimately be touched by spring. However, the tanka’s clearsighted recognition that all human life ends is one of its greatest strengths.
Before leaving this second tanka, it would be useful to note its grammatical structure. It has no finite verbs, though the reader may read an implied ‘is’ before ‘blooming’ and ‘waiting’. It is a series of phrases, yet it has been carefully constructed to flow smoothly and maintain sense, a challenge all tanka writers face. The absence of finite verbs assists in the disorienting shift achieved via ‘another bed’ in line three.
The final tanka to be considered is by another Australian tanka writer, Margaret L. Grace.
casting a stone
into a billabong
broken reflections —
I return his house key
but not the dog we shared
(Eucalypt: a tanka journal Issue 23, 2017)
The tanka opens with no immediate reference to place. It describes a gesture – ‘casting a stone’ – which suggests many possibilities – whimsical, violent, accusatory.
However, the tanka fixes its location and begins to establish its mood by line two – ‘into a billabong’. Derived from the Wiradjuri word ‘bilabang’, the term ‘billabong’ places the tanka in outback or rural Australia. (These cut-off meanders are called ‘oxbow lakes’ in England and the United States.)
Still the purpose of the thrown stone is not quite clear, though its effect is described in line three – ‘broken reflections’. As in Austin’s ‘nothing blooming’, the link and shift centre on line three. They are signposted by the m-dash.
Lines four and five – ‘I return his house key / but not the dog we shared’ – clarify the significance of the rural prelude. This is not only a tanka of place, though it has two significant settings, the bank of a billabong and the front porch or perhaps the mailbox of a former lover’s house.
The final two lines confirm that this is a poem of lost connections and broken relationships. As in many good tanka, the two portions of the piece serve to deepen and extend each other. The tanka is remarkable for the space it gives its readers to develop their sense of what has occurred.
By line five, the reader can now imagine why the speaker sits by the water and casts a stone, shattering the calm surface. The billabong serves not only as a physical location but as a metaphor for her sense of separation. As in Empress Jito’s ‘spring has passed’, the place where the tanka is set has a literal and figurative value. ‘Broken reflections’ skilfully connects the tanka’s two parts. The tanka’s subject has had her emotional world disrupted and, perhaps, her image of herself and her lover shattered. The stone she casts appears a response to that as well as an image of destruction. The tanka leaves readers to speculate how the images will reform.
The dog referred to in the closing line is another invitation for the reader to surmise. The speaker’s retention of the dog she once shared with her lover can be interpreted in numerous ways. Perhaps as a final rejection of her former partner; perhaps as a way of preserving something of value from their relationship. The past tense of the last two words – ‘we shared’ – gives a lingering poignancy to the loss she has suffered.
The link and shift technique discussed here, as well as other, perhaps less obvious features, are key elements of traditional tanka and are a valuable means of increasing the strength of contemporary writers’ work. Across these three tanka it is possible to see the emotional range of the form and the way in which locations –geographically specific, generic, or personal – can be used to contribute to tanka’s power
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Gavin Austin for his permission to reproduce his tanka ‘nothing blooming’ and to Professor Laurel Rasplica Rodd, whose translation of Empress Jito’s ‘spring has passed’ is an open-access text for non-commercial purposes.
Unfortunately, my further efforts were unsuccessful, in seeking to gain permission to reprint the third tanka, ‘casting a stone’, but thanks also to Lynette Arden, Dawn Bruce and Beverley George (foundation and former editor of Eucalypt: a tanka journal), who all assisted my attempts to contact the poet Margaret L Grace.
Jo McInerney