Alan (1934 -) has been writing tanka poems since 1968: this was his first:
Shipwrecked leaf steers
to avoid a sucking drain.
Red hawthorn tears
drip along the sodden lane.
Autumn’s drowning in the rain.
He has published two tanka collections, both by HappenStance Press: No Biography (2010) and Gerontion (2016) - a few are also included in To Rocamadour (Redbeck Press 2005). He has also written extensively in free verse but, as noted elsewhere on this site, he has made the tanka form his own – his poems are fluent, natural, often funny and very English.
He wrote more frequently after retiring from a busy professional life in secondary and tertiary education:
See me, the teacher,
like a railway porter,
guiding travellers
to destinations which I
know only from the posters.
Alan writes movingly and originally about advancing age:
That is a strange day
when you wake to discover
age has drifted down
imperceptibly, like dust,
and you’re totally covered.
Many of his poems are personal but outward-looking, and many are concerned with social commentary and small ‘p’ political themes:
It’s snowing buzzwords.
Thought is buried in drifts of
fashionable snow.
Will this winter never thaw
into a spring of thinking?
Alan is a fluent poet who has found that the brevity and concision of the tanka form suits many of his concerns and observations. His poetic imagination is versatile and lively, individual and recognisable. And modest:
Short of mental breath,
I sing no swelling themes, but
write my five-line stints
like chipped-off flakes of paint that
disclose the dry grain beneath.
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