Buy the Books
First Winter Rain: Selected Tanka from 2006-2010
ISBN 978-1-935398-21-9. Trade paperback. 168 pages. |
First Winter Rain
is Denis M. Garrison's first collection of tanka. The Introduction to the collection is by M. Kei.
“What I am struck by is the depth and openness of Garrison’s work, and a sincerity that raises his art high above the playing field of today’s tanka in English. I hadn’t hoped to find such a wealth of tanka in one book by a single author this season or next! First Winter Rain holds a breadth of felt experience you owe to yourself.” —Larry Kimmel, editor of Winfred Press “First Winter Rain is a welcome new poetry collection from a master of the tanka form in English. Between these covers we find individual tanka grouped in 8 themed chapters, where Denis Garrison’s poetic virtuosity ranges across passionate love lyrics, strongly resonant tanka of place, and elegiac mood pieces. There are lush poems of peace, despairing poems of war; poems of hopefulness, poems of resignation; Garrison expresses succinctly the yin and yang of life, often within the one tanka:
I am a speck “Following the individual poems there is a long final chapter of enthralling tanka presented in sets, strings and sequences, within which each piece stands alone and also resonates with the next. There could be no better description of the brilliance of Garrison’s work, as showcased in First Winter Rain, than this tanka which appears in its first chapter:
These unstrung beads —Amelia Fielden M.A., translator and poet, Australia
“Wide-ranging in subject matter, restless and probing in their inquiry of the human heart, Denis Garrison’s tanka are somewhere near the fulcrum of all his efforts in poetry as editor, poet, and essayist. This generous, good man gifts us all with a lifetime of experience in the highs and lows of a well-traveled soul.”
“Poet, editor and publisher, Denis M. Garrison, is a key contributor to the development of tanka in English. His practical encouragement of other writers is widely recognised and appreciated. First Winter Rain: Selected Tanka from 2006–2010 charts his personal journey on the tanka pathway with poems that successfully explore the potential of this diminutive genre to capture the essence of all that is of moment to the human heart.”
“Denis M. Garrison, well known as the publisher of Modern English Tanka Press, is an accomplished poet in his own right. In First Winter Rain, he brings together selected tanka to tell a story, a story which looks very much like his own, but which isn’t quite autobiography. The poems carry the deep marks of war and tragedy that must of necessity evolve into a keen appreciation for beauty; without beauty there can be no redemption from the horrors of life. Garrison’s details are so vivid and so accurate, that I, who also spent my childhood in Iowa and my adulthood in Maryland, can recognize his places without being told. When he travels foreign sands where I have never trod, I am not lost in an alien landscape but find the same vivid attention to detail gives me a visceral view as if I were riding in the backseat of his memories. First Winter Rain is proof that tanka is not a hothouse exotic but a thoroughly naturalized American literary form that can thrive in the most demanding environments.”
“Praise for First Winter Rain — It’s risky to publish 252 poems gathered from the prior five years of composition. With such a high number written in such a short time, chances are that a lot of weak work will sneak through a screening process that still needs fine-tuning. But, this doesn’t seem to be the case here. Almost all of his tanka burst with the energy of the everyday and the experimentation of a curious mind.”
|