moonlight on water

Skylark is delighted to introduce Jenny Ward Angyal's debut collection of tanka,
tanka sequences and tanka prose:

moonlight on water

Jenny Ward Angyal’s long-awaited first collection of tanka, including sequences and tanka prose, represents a considerable body of work by an author for whom poetry is breath and blood. The opening section entitled ‘so many doors left open’ not only echoes the tanka written in memory of the poet’s mother and her gifts of advent calendars down the years, but hints at the mystery and otherworldliness that beckon the moment the reader steps over the threshold into Jenny’s unique story, as well as the questions that will re-main unanswered (and rightly so) when the journey is done . . . Every tanka is a miniature reflection of this beautiful soul, another tile in the mosaic of ephemera; another mirror-gem in Indra’s Net of which she, too, is a part: 

ripples
passing through 
each other 
in an ink-dark pool 
our mirrored faces 

But Jenny Angyal has found a way to tack herself to eternity: 

scribbling 
faint words to address 
the infinite— 
I pluck one thread 
in the harp of stars

(From the Foreword by Claire Everett, Founder and Editor of Skylark).

Jenny Ward Angyal is a fine guide on the tanka sequence trail. It probably helps that she seems to write from some primordial, archetypal forty-acre parcel the reader has rarely visited: "high in the arms/of a sugar maple" (heartwood); "the rough old floors/my mother speckled" (house); "born with a caul/the filly struggles" (mare's milk). In the sequences that took me the farthest, I traveled with her to a timeless place where people live near streams, play flutes, and "catch for a moment/time's powdered wings" (chrysalis). Her shifting often surprised me in ways that, after their initial unexpectedness, had me nodding: I see that.

(From 'Jenny Ward Angyal's Sequences', an Afterword by David Rice, Editor of Ribbons).


Cover design by Owen Smith

to order a copy, click here