Margaret Chula
Cover and Design by Susan Gardner
92 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, perfect bound — ($21.95) discounted 10% to $20.00
Perigee Moon is a collection of tanka, the elegant poetic form used by Japanese court poets over 1300 years ago to express desire, longing, and unrequited love. These short five-line poems create space in the reader’s mind and heart to enter the poem through their own experiences. Arranged in five sections with themes of love, family, childhood, nature, and travel, the poems in Perigee Moon weave themselves through time into a cohesive whole. From Theseus to a Zen monastery to a Goth girl to courting juncos, a panoply of emotions is revealed through images and the musicality of Chula’s language. Her tanka (“short songs”) sing out and celebrate what it is to be alive in the 21st century. from the Introduction by Michael Dylan Welch
unlike Pygmalion’s
marble Galatea
my lover’s lips
are pliant and warm
and taste of strawberries
how can I write
a decent tanka
about loneliness
with you beside me
nibbling my neck
red rover, red rover
she was always the last one
to be called over—
my faint-hearted mother
who outlived all her friends
in my dream
Mother is still alive
I fall back to sleep
to finish our stroll
in the summer garden
Second Prize, The San Francisco International Competition for Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka, 2019
sixty years gone by
and even now that outrage—
first day of school
and being scolded for playing
with trucks on the boys’ side
cradled in my palm
my baby sister’s ashes
and shards of bones—
remembering how I envied
her high cheekbones
First Prize, British Haiku Society International Tanka Contest, 2019
“In Perigee Moon, Margaret Chula writes with pinpoints of poignancy, bringing us closer to nature, to the lover, to the mother, and to life itself. Above all, we are drawn closer to our innermost selves, just as the perigee moon is drawn to the earth. Almost imperceptibly, Chula merges the elegance of the Japanese tradition with the finger-snap of the modern world. Her graceful voice heralds the way for non-Japanese.” —Patricia Donegan
“Imbued with a Japanese sensibility and rendered in an American idiom, these masterful five-line poems are a sheer pleasure to read. Ranging in subject and tone from the erotic to the dolorous—and never without a touch of humor—each one makes an unexpected turn or pivot, a little poof of surprise, in the manner of the traditional tanka. Margaret Chula is an unquestionable master of the form.” —Clemens Starck
“Margaret Chula migrates the ancient tanka form into English with all its virtuosity intact. Her poems are by turns tender, startling, ironical, acerbic, gritty, hilarious, self-deprecating, and achingly true. I will always treasure these poems for their loving sadness about the human predicament, and for images that can stun the reader into enlightenment: ‘one daffodil / fallen face down / into a water bowl / Mother’s slender neck / as she drank from the stream.'” —Patrick Donnelly