| Oregon Haiku & Tanka Society |
| B o o k R e v i e w |
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| Margaret Chula, Always Filling, Always Full Always Filling, Always Full is an exciting collection of tanka, the ancient Japanese five-line poem. More lyrical than haiku, tanka embrace moments of love, loss and longing as well as the more humorous events of our lives. Chula's tanka are concise, moving, alive perceptions of the full range of human feelings. Her juxtapositions of nature and human feelings surprise and delight with their originality. A poem that begins with discovering bleached deer bones under fallen leaves shifts to a friend dying of cancer. Like the Japanese water basin which inspired the title, the reader is at once satisfied and eager for the next poem. the black negligee that I bought for your return hangs in my closet day by day plums ripen and are picked clean by birds after the cease fire refugees from Chechnya return to rubble sparrows weave the hair of children into their spring nests "Working within the sinuous tradition of the Japanese tanka form, Margaret Chula has found a voice that bows both in the direction of earlier works and toward the unknown the next poem, whose perception is always ungraspable until the words fall into place. In this world where we have come more and more to see that each thing touches every other, this book is welcome proof of the universality and particularity of the human heart."� Jane Hirshfield "Always Filling, Always Full is a collection that gracefully fulfills the promise of its title: to lead the human heart to the brim of feeling and simultaneously to empty the psychic vessel, so that creation and dissolution, coming-to-meet and passing-beyond, may be poised in perfect dynamic balance, as they are in the clear awakened life of the Zen practitioner."� Carolyne Wright Always Filling, Always Full, White Pine Press (2001), Preface by Jane Hirshfield; Illustrations by Jef Gunn; 112 pages; 5 1/2 X 8 1/2 perfect bound; ISBN: 1-893996-11-5; $14.00 postpaid from Katsura Press, P.O. Box 275, Lake Oswego, OR 97034 |