Poets Behind Barbed Wire

Jay and Kiro Nakano

This slim volume is an anthology of tanka from poets incarcerated in the prison camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Expect inconsistency, as you should any time an anthology of poetry revolving around a political theme emerges. This one's above average, from a quality standpoint. Perhaps it's because the tanka form stops poets from allowing themselves the free hand that leads to so much awful political poetry. Perhaps it's just because the poets herein are all established masters of the form. Either way, this anthology has more bang for the buck than the vast majority of anti-war anthologies.

The four poets represented here-- Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, and Muin Ozaki-- are four of the finest tanka poets America ever produced. (Well, okay, they were born in Japan, but all spent the majority of their lives over here.) All four have far better grasp of the use of metaphor than most antiwar poets, and a much better honed sense of subtlety; again, these things are likely inherent to the form in which the poets are writing. An example from Takei:

Should I talk
To the lonely cactus
Standing yonder in the desert
About the sorrows of Spring?

Not all of what's here has that kind of quiet power, but enough does that this anthology is worth seeking out.