Day: December 31, 2015

Tanka by Beverley George featured in Melbourne jazz performance

Earlier in December, leading Australian tanka poet Beverley George – editor of “Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal” – was honoured to have the following three pieces from her tanka collection “empty garden” featured in a live performance that formed part of the Melbourne Women’s Jazz Festival, held in Bennetts Lane, Melbourne:

a lightning strike
splits our old apple tree–
I never dreamed
the death that parted us
would not be one of ours

it’s in our garden
that I miss you most
each year the stems
of rosemary you planted
grow harder to cut back

widening each day
the winter river rushes
over hidden rocks
if you asked me to return
I could no longer cross it

Subsequently included on a CD, Beverley’s tanka were read live by Miriam Zolin, accompanied by a jazz trio comprised by pianist Andrea Keller, bassist Tamara Murphy and trumpeter Eugene Ball.

A review of this performance can be accessed at the following link:

http://ausjazz.net/2015/12/09/solace-in-an-empty-garden/

“Eucalypt” Issue 19, 2015 – Appraisals

From every issue of “Eucalypt: a tanka journal,” edited by Beverley George, two poems are peer-selected for appraisal.

Congratulations to Jenny Ward Angyal and Sonam Chhoki, whose tanka were chosen for appraisal by Patricia Prime and Anne Curran.

You can read about them here:

http://www.eucalypt.info/E-awards.html

While visiting the site, you may also wish to read a wide selection of tanka appraisals at:

http://www.eucalypt.info/E-bowerbird.html

A regular feature of the full-day Bowerbird workshops, convened twice a year, is a presentation by each of three delegates of a tanka by a poet whom the presenter has never met. The appraisals are lively and varied.