The Five-Hole Flute: Modern English Tanka in Sequences and Sets

The Five-Hole Flute: Modern English Tanka in Sequences and Sets was edited by Denis M. Garrison and Michael McClintock. It affords the reader an impressively compact and rich overview of modern tanka, cinquain, and haiku, and of the changing shape and power of these forms when arranged in sets and sequences. The works in this exemplary collection offer a glimpse into the extraordinary diversity and sometimes startling richness of the modern short poem in English, and disclose a fascinating but hitherto concealed dimension of literary creativity: the integration of autonomous short poems into new, coherent, interactive patterns that break free of the conventional stanzaic forms of longer narrative, epic, and lyrical verse. Several techniques are illustrated—including anaphora, thematic linking, antiphonal response, and more—demonstrating the manifold possibilities for grouping tanka, cinquain, and haiku in compositions that convey an expanded poetic experience, a compound literature having broad scope and unlimited potential for dealing with the many layers and complexities of human experience, thought, and emotion. Resonant with the breadth and vision of literary collage, mural, and existential mandala, the short form poets of the twenty-first century reveal cultural and artistic roots not only in the ancient Japanese waka/tanka tradition, but equally in the subjective realism of the Impressionist painters and the short works of such Imagist poets as Adelaide Crapsey, the early Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Amy Lowell, H.D, and Wallace Stevens. “The Five-Hole Flute is a book beautiful in every way, the promise of the covers’ enticing colors being richly fulfilled on page after page. In this treasure of magnificent poems the reader is delighted to discover so many approaches—some direct, some subtle—to the intertwining of five-line insights, observations, revelations. The collection carries the modern English tanka several major steps along its path to recognition as an essential and valued part of contemporary Western literature.” —Carol Purington • Back to the Selected Books page.