Ash Moon Anthology - short poems on aging
ASH MOON ANTHOLOGY edited by Alexis Rotella & Denis M. Garrison, 315 pages, published by MET Press, is perhaps the largest anthology of tanka in English. It is available in both paperback & hard cover from www.themetpress.com/bookstore/ and may be read free and downloaded as an ebook at Scribd.com. What folks are saying about the book:
Ash Moon Anthology explores and celebrates the later years of life: the “golden years,” to some, and far from it, to others. Senior men and women have a perspective on life that cannot be achieved except by enduring the passage of several decades. Ash Moon Anthology includes poems about all aspects of aging, both the ups and downs, the joys and the sorrows; poems that embody the humor, insight, and wisdom of our elders and the ways in which we age with grace and even elegance. This is a tremendous collection of nearly nine hundred poems on aging from 97 poets on five continents.
“If readers can absorb the joy and the intensity of this book, they will be more alive than ever before in their lives. I am stunned by the precision of emotions and the variety of feelings. I want to read one page each day, to be in touch with everything that is truly, vividly alive.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Producer/host, The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress
“These tanka examine the feelings and psychological insights that can only come with a lifetime of surviving into old age, when we recognize the impermanence and transitory nature of our bodies, our minds, our selves. These English tanka of aging celebrate and explore a wide range of moments conveying the feelings of being fully alive in our imperfect, broken, unfinished bodies, minds and souls.” —Dr. Randy Brooks, Millikin University
“Age. It happens to us all. Understanding all that we are and have experienced is difficult enough, but communicating it to others is even harder, especially when the gap is dramatic as the one separating today’s youth from today’s elders. This is the chasm which the poets of Ash Moon cross. Nearly a hundred in number, they are themselves aging or the care-givers and companions of elders. With unblinking honesty they record their age as it is lived—despair and dereliction alongside grace and humor—and what emerges is a true portrait of age with all its awkward complexities.” — M. Kei, Editor of Atlas Poetica: A Journal of Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka, Editor-in-chief of Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka of 2008, and author of Heron Sea, Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay.
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