Landfall: Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka

Landfall: Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka was edited by Denis M. Garrison and Michael McClintock. Landfall deals with rural life; it is about the lands we live in, the highlands and the lowlands, prairies and forests, deserts and wetlands, farmlands and wilderness, the vast continental interiors and the lands bordering the seas, and the waters of the earth. As such, it is inevitably a book about ourselves. Through tanka, the short poetry of our time, this book is intended to rediscover the mood, temper, and diversity of the infinitely varied and nuanced places where we live our lives, and to reacquaint the reader with all those landscapes that have imprinted us with their forms and colors, their scents and sounds, and that have their parallels in each of us, in our consciousness and spirit. Every generation makes anew its own landfall, discovering for itself its special, abiding relationship to the natural world. With these fine tanka, pastoral poems of a new kind for a new day, the greatly prized moment of making landfall becomes, also, an irrevocable moment of personal epiphany. • Back to the Selected Books page.