music tanka - two poems

David Gilbey is a poet. These Australian poems explore and contribute to the tradition of tanka poetry, originally from Japan but enjoying a world-wide new currency. The tanka's mixture of intensity and indirectness lends itself to an exploration in language, imagery and structure of Australian experiences and understandings. Having lived and taught and studied in Japan, my particular challenge was to find my way into the subtle formalities of the tanka form and experiment with new ways to use it for my own poetic articulation. To have two tanka accepted for publication, and to read them at the launch in Canberra was to feel that my particular poetic voice had an international literary context.