A Favorite Tanka:
                            Elements of Narrative Technique

Tanka is a poetry form similar to haiku in that it uses a variety of techniques to invite the reader to linger within the verse, to inhabit it with the heart and imagination. Caesuras or breaks at the ends of lines stop the eye from slipping through the verse too quickly and give the reader time to let the images take hold in the mind's eye. Juxtaposed images create resonances that illuminate the images alone and in combination. And finally, ambiguity―that antidote to what the late poet William Stafford called "insulting clarity"―raises questions the reader feels compelled to answer by thinking through the many possible layers of meaning as the verse unfolds, image by image, line by line. All these are present in a tanka of stark beauty and deeply felt loneliness and grief by the Tasmanian poet and artist, Ron Moss:

almost home:
   in the silence of mountains,
   light between the dark―
   the grief, though fleeting,
   brings me back to you

The narrator in the poem is returning home. The silence of late afternoon penetrates the mountains. Light streams through the narrow valleys, stark and lovely midst deep shadows cast by towering peaks―a scene that compels meditation with its sheer beauty. Three times in the verse, clarifying punctuation stops the eye, though briefly and without disrupting the flow of lines, with a colon, a comma, and an em dash, and the vivid, painterly images sink into the reader's imagination.

Then comes the juxtaposition of commentary, beginning in line 4―"the grief, though fleeting,"―that recasts in the reader's mind the overlying mood of this mountain scenery through which the narrator is traveling. The stillness, the vivid lights and deep shadows may evoke the knife-like edge of psychological pain for the reader. Or the mountains themselves, ancient and evocative of the eternal, may be seen as a foil against all that is fleeting briefly plays, including grief. In effect, the mountain scenery may become an emotional as well as a metaphorical landscape in the reader's mind, achieved in this verse entirely by the suggestive juxtaposition of image and commentary.

Finally, the fifth line and the words "brings me back to you." In this last line, we find an ambiguity that calls into question every reference within the poem. Who is coming home? who is grieving and why? And who is "you"? These are ambiguities of subject, circumstance, and personal reference. They invite the reader to revisit each line and each image in the poem in order to answer the questions that each of these ambiguities raise and thereby inhabit the poem even more deeply. Whether or not answers are found, of course, is subject to the heart and imagination of the reader, but I believe that in this deeply meditative poem, the search itself makes the mountains more luminous and the coming "back to you" a redemption to be shared with the poet.

Poem and painting by Ron Moss

~ Jeanne Emrich

This essay first appeared in Ribbons, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2005.

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