Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 2

Book Name: Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 2

Author:  Compiled by M. Kei  and team

Genre: Poetry, Tanka

Paperback, First Edition: 200 pages

Published 2009 by MET Press

ISBN13: 9781935398202

Rating: 5 stars

Short review: A treasure-chest of poetic genius 

Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 2 is the sequel to Volumes 1. This is an annual compilation of tanka, ranging from 16,000 submissions to 140 venues. M.Kei and his team of editors, including names like Alexis Rotella and Kala Ramesh have worked on this  volume which contains individual tanka, tanka prose and tanka sequences. 

Kei describes Volume 2 as ' tracing out exciting new developments and the increasingly democratic appeal of the form (tanka)'.

Volume Two includes poems by previously unpublished authors, most of whom frequent the pages of Twitter. The editors have reviewed over two thousand tanka from Twitter alone for this volume. 

One of the tanka selected from Twitter ...

twenty three dollars
in the bank account
these days
even a crow’s cackle
will shake my bones

(Sean Greenlaw)

This volume also highlights a tanka by Sanford Goldstein.  This is how Kei describes Goldstein ...

Goldstein has been writing tanka of extraordinary honesty for more than four decades. At eighty-four he is the oldest tanka poet still writing and publishing today, and has had the longest tanka career of any living tanka poet working in English:

another
Father's day
I did
not visit
his grave

(Sanford Goldstein)

Tanka Sequences include names like Carol Raisfeld, Angela Leuck, M. Kei, Jean LeBlanc, Jared Carter and Alexis Rotella. 

What I am surprised about is the amount of tanka shared on twitter.  The team has no doubt tapped into this rich resource of tanka talent to bring life and love to tanka and tanka lovers. 

Do take the time to read this volume.  Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 2 is available at the Lulu bookstore.  You may follow the link, or use the Book Title / ISBN number as given above. 

(The anthologies Volumes 1 to 3, published by MET Press will be out of print soon.  Those who wish to purchase their copy may do so at the earliest.)

Book reviews in this series

Book Review: Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 1

Book Review: Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 3

Book Review: Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 4