Sanford Goldstein's collection of tanka collections has been published in a single volume, Four Decades on My Tanka Road - destined to become a classic of pioneering tanka in English. This book is a tanka treasure chest, filled with nearly five hundred poems by the acknowledged master of the genre, Sanford Goldstein. Not only has Goldstein, with his translating partners, made the classics of modern Japanese poetry available in English, he has written some of the best tanka ever rendered first in English. Six published collections of the tanka of Sanford Goldstein are compiled in this single, historic, volume by “the father of tanka in English.” For anyone who wants to understand tanka, who wants a genuine tanka experience, this book is a must-read. Sanford Goldstein’s Four Decades on My Tanka Road is where you start your own journey with the world’s oldest continually-anthologized poetic genre. PRESS RELEASE: December 22, 2007 - Four Decades on My Tanka Road by Sanford Goldstein Published by Modern English Tanka Press

Larry Kimmel's collection, this hunger, tissue-thin, includes 177 tanka culled from the past decade of Larry Kimmel’s work in this genre. Referred to as one of the seminal east-west fusionists, Kimmel covers a wide range of subject matter including a love of land, urban nights, eroticism and philosophical speculation. He uses all five senses, and while his method is imagistic, a certain heightened use of language is the hallmark of his craft.
Praise for the book: "As I read [Larry Kimmel’s] poems and enter into their fascinating ambiguity or momentary hunger or desire, I feel certain that the collection is one of the seminal tanka books of the past decade." —Sanford Goldstein, renowned tanka-poet, translator, teacher. 
"To read Larry Kimmel’s tanka is to journey with him through the subtly evoked landscapes of his experience, literal and psychological. The stroller’s sidewalk and the mountain inhabited by a hermit poet are alike familiar to his perception, which is sometimes melancholy, often ironic, always crisply imagistic." —Carol Purington, award-winning tanka-poet.
"Open this book! Pick any poem! I guarantee that you will be touched and pleasurably scarred forever by the delicate bittersweet musings of a poet who, for fifty years/ through all weathers/ of the mind has loved the world. You will recognize yourself in the depths of his poetry." —Kirsty Karkow, award-winning author of two collections of poetry and tanka editor for Simply Haiku.
PRESS RELEASE: December 23, 2007 - This Hunger, Tissue-Thin by Larry Kimmel Published by Modern English Tanka Press

Denis M. Garrison's collection of free and formal verse, Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems, was published right at the end of the year. Michael McClintock, in his preface to the collection, writes: "Contained in Sailor in the Rain are some of the best poems of an American original, Denis M. Garrison. They are gleaned from previous collections large and small, and are presented in a carefully ordered narrative structure having a beginning, middle, and an end. . . . Garrison’s sense of place and region, and his consciousness and reckoning of good and evil, order and chaos, truth and deceit, are all essential to his character as a poet, and that character relates his work to a diverse group of poets who span several centuries and have similar interests and thematic pre-occupations. His ‘Confessio’ might have been written by John Donne, as part of that poet’s series of ‘Holy Sonnets.’ Garrison’s haunted and haunting landscapes relate to similar metaphysical elements found in the earliest American poets and prose masters: Edward Taylor and Philip Freneau, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garrison’s concerns with symbolic argument and imagery (including the ambiguous and macabre) find their precursors in Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé —the latter, also, for a shared fascination for the interplay and revelations of style and content that a poet may achieve when pursuing the essence of invented, perfect poetic forms."  PRESS RELEASE: December 31, 2007 - Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems by Denis M. Garrison Published by Modern English Tanka Press

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