Morning Tanka

$19.99

Morning Tanka is a conversation via tanka love letters, a gentle ballet of great blue herons in Merrymeeting Bay during mating season. It is a nasturtium calling to a hummingbird to extract its nectar and a bumblebee flirting with a sunflower on a summer day.

What Dane Ince and Mercedes Dugger have gifted us is romance unfettered. Their love tankas are both otherworldly and hopeful with language that effortlessly mimics birdsong, spring breezes, and babbling brooks.

This collection of poetry is something altogether new while it also feels as if it was pulled from ancient manuscripts written in a different language. The crowning touch is the homage to the Japanese form of poetry from translation into Japanese by world-renowned poet Yuri Miki.

What a wonderful gift for a spouse, life partner, or lover. This book would make a wonderful engagement or anniversary present for friends whose love demands to be celebrated.

Morning Tanka reasserts why we need love poems in our world.

 Bryan Franco, Poet, author of Everything I Think is All In my Mind, Brunswick, Maine.

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Description

A sensory buffet that tingles and teases the reader with its sheer visual impact. These exquisite tankas are intensely personal word paintings with striking and potent imagery. I was enraptured with the deftly woven skeins of nature, love and desire. “Shimmer water kissing lips Like ships sinking into fog.” The Japanese form of poetry that began in the seventh century is effectively carried forward in California today by Dane and Mercedes in these morning notes of gratitude and love. The metaphors are endearingly fresh, the passion palpable. These five-line tanka letters are conversational in tone even as they disarmingly bare body and soul. The fragrant sensuality rises above the wondrous awe that the poets feel for each other. A book to be kept close to your bed in order to savour its sheer genius. Congratulations to the duo for this gift of concise writing, adorned with elegant wit and flaming brush strokes of poetic fervour.

 

Lily Swarn, International Beat Poet Laureate India 2023-2024 and Caesar Vallejo award for literary excellence by UHE, internationally acclaimed, multilingual poet, author, columnist, gold medalist, university colour holder, radio show host, Peace and Humanity Ambassador, writes different genres. History on my Plate won her the Best Author Award. Rippling Moonbeams got Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi award for Best Book of the year. With over 70 international and national awards, Lily’s poetry has been translated into 21 languages and she has authored eight books.