“Komachi and Shikibu would recognize a sister spirit.”  Jane Hirshfield

“Beverley George has spear-headed the promotion of tanka in Australia through her Yellow Moon magazine tanka competitions and the introduction of Eucalypt, Australia’s first literary magazine devoted entirely to this genre. ..

 With empty garden she takes her place as one of Australia's finest, and internationally, one of the most successful English language tanka practitioners.  Her tanka are sensual and and incisive, written with a sensitivity of language that ensures they will remain a benchmark for the genre.” 
 Janice M. Bostok (From the back cover of empty garden) 

Beverley George is a master of the compressed, imaginative lyric, and  . . . has a canny way of being able to convey her layers of experience and meaning while keeping intact the essential mysteries of the mind and heart.

George’s study of Heian court poetry and subsequent high regard for it are amply reflected throughout the poems in empty garden, written a thousand years later and seven thousand miles by sea from the court culture and capital at Heian (modern Kyoto). Her poems are replete with the symbolisms and metaphors of nature, particularly of the ocean, by which she has resided since 2001 in her home at Pearl Beach, on the central coast of New South Wales. Beverley George’s themes, however, are the intricacies of human relationships—her own, and those of the people around her, whom she has observed and come to know…

Our thirst for good poetry, such as found here, can only grow when the water is this clear and sweet.”
Michael McClintock (From the foreword of empty garden)
 

Some verses from empty garden

combing through seaweed 
for an unbroken shell –
once my long hair
spilling over us
shut out the fire’s light

after you ring off
I go to find the moon–
like you
it's north of here
and just as far away

rip-tide –
slowly I return
an occupied shell
to the surging sea
between us

 

Beverley George is an Australian poet and editor of Eucalypt. This is her first collection of tanka.

empty garden, with foreword by Michael McClintock, 44 pages, 27 x 18cm, perfect bound. Sydney, Yellow Moon, 2006

Within Australia – AUD $15 including S&H
New Zealand, Japan – AUD $17.50 (US bills $13) including airmail postage
UK, US, Canada, Europe – AUD $19 (US bills $15) including airmail postage

Ordering information: available from the author at PO Box 37 Pearl Beach 2256 Australia or by visiting www.eucalypt.info.

 

Return to the Tanka Online Bookstore Main Page.