Keibooks Announces circling smoke, scattered bones by Joy McCall, edited by M. Kei

Keibooks Announces circling smoke, scattered bones by Joy McCall

Press Release – For Immediate Release – Please post to all appropriate venues

31 October 2013– Perryville, Maryland, USA

“There is a veil in this world, a mystery. Everyone knows it, or senses it; those who don’t,  perhaps, sense it most of all. Maybe more a skeptic than a believer, Joy McCall knows all about spirits for, you see, she, too, is one. The beautiful verse, the tanka herein, are not about nature in the conventional, Western sense, not in the sense so often found in Eastern-inflected work. They are nature.”--Don Wentworth, Editor and Poet, Lilliput Review

Joy McCall’s collection of tanka poetry, circling smoke, scattered bones, published by Keibooks, is the debut collection of a powerful new voice. Intensely autobiographical with a focus on the details of her daily life, they are also intensely social. Joy is not an island, but a mother, daughter, sister, wife, friend, neighbor, nurse, helper, and witness to the tribulations and joys of her community in Norwich, England. 

how lovely you look

in the green silk coat and hat

barefoot on the path

by the river; above you

the green silk of the willows

witches, demons

and all those dark ancient spirits

stalk the streets

in the guise of passersby

in the faces of citizens

tracing

the silver labyrinth

with one finger

always wondering

where the road will lead

“Joy has compassion for all creatures: the spider dangling from its thread, mice, birds, madwomen, felons, old nuns, drunks, ghosts, and the unnamed dead with their broken gravestones. To read Joy’s tanka is to walk the unseen world that overlaps the streets and fields of her hometown. The veil that separates us from other people, living or dead, is a gossamer that parts when she waves her magic wand.”--M. Kei, author of January, a Tanka Diary

circling smoke, scattered bones

by Joy McCall

Edited by M. Kei

ISBN 978-0615880006 (Print) 176 pp

$15.00 USD (print) or $5.00 USD (Kindle)

Purchase in print at: https://www.createspace.com/4425863

Also available in print and ebook at Amazon.com and other online retailers.

Keibooks

P O Box 516

Perryville, MD 21903 USA

<AtlasPoetica.org>

Keibooks Announces January, A Tanka Diary, by M. Kei

Keibooks Announces January, A Tanka Diary, by M. Kei

Press Release – For Immediate Release – Please post to all appropriate venues

28 September 2013– Perryville, Maryland, USA

"Step inside this book and meet a magician—a man who knows the secrets of the sea and the land and the sky; a man who can catch the vastness of oceans and the smallness of sparrows in the same few words in five lines."—Joy McCall

Opening with the cold days of January and following the poet through a year of his life, January, A Tanka Diary, is the latest collection from the internationally respected tanka poet and editor, M. Kei. Melancholy, hopeful, or satiric, these are poems alive to the beauty of the world. He has the ability to capture subjects as small as a single snowflake or as big as history, all told with an intimate honesty. In Kei's hands, the ancient five line tanka poem breathes with contemporary life. 

Each tanka appears in the order in which it was written with a date attached. We can see the poet sitting down to write on New Year’s Day, and the multitude of poems and subjects that flow from his pen. We can follow him as he hikes and writes tanka over the bones of a dead deer, and as he explores the mysteries of the natural world. Of course, we follow him to sea in the company of sailboats and pelicans. 

A large collection, January, A Tanka Diary, contains 640 poems of which more than 220 have never been seen before. The rest are collected from the scores of venues in which he has published around the world. Fans of his work will no doubt recognize some of their favorite tanka, but will see them as they were written in the company of other poems from the same date. The author of Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, shows us that he is as sensitive to life ashore as at sea.

somewhere 

in the darkness

inside my heart

the lights of a distant city

are burning

empty

but still attached, 

two clamshells

something like

a husband and wife

my hand on the tiller

like Water Rat and Mole,

with no particular place to go

and no particular desire

to get there any time soon

Comments from Sanford Goldstein, author of Journeys Far and Near:

“In the past sixty-five years I cannot remember a tanka collection as long as M. Kei’s January, A Tanka Diary. The collection contains 640 tanka, 420 published not in his previous collections, but in journals and other places, and 220 new poems. It is a fascinating voyage of discovery of a Kei we have not known this well. The book starts from January 1, 2007, to the next January 1. It surprised me that Kei is so interested in flowers, birds, grass, clouds, sky—of course with his duty aboard floating vessels he is intimate with the ocean. The subjects vary of course, but what I found particularly fascinating is that the two final lines of the tanka bring a surprise and hold up the entire poem. 

“I have no room to cite individual poems, but one that appeals to me is a laundry day in which Kei’s larger underwear is drying outside with his son’s much smaller underwear. Another poem is about his daughter—Kei has come home, opens the refrigerator door to find the chicken inside had been plucked, so he knows his daughter had visited him. Poems of a sexual nature occur, one of which I once criticized as not being in the right order for a sequence. 

“Such an enormous undertaking cannot be read at a sitting. Take your time in reading it. On a second reading I discovered elements I had not thought of. Yes, do read it and experience a new tanka view of Kei’s world.”

Comments from Joy McCall, author of circling smoke, scattered bones:

“Step inside this book and meet a magician—a man who knows the secrets of the sea and the land and the sky; a man who can catch the vastness of oceans and the smallness of sparrows in the same few words in five lines. M. Kei blazes a trail. This is a big beautiful gathering, to keep forever.

“There is great sadness in these poems. There is deep longing. There is humour, too. He makes me smile. There are insights which surprise. There are poems of great beauty that catch the breath. There are everyday poems which remind us we are all human.

“This book will be going with me everywhere I go. I love every poem in it.  But if I have to pick a favourite, it's this one: 

it's a day like any other,

full of melancholy

pessimism,

and yet—somewhere

there are herons

“Some things are beyond my words. If you buy nothing else this year, not even food, buy this book.”

January, A Tanka Diary

ISBN 978-0615871561 (Print) 275 pp

also available for Kindle

$18.00 USD (print) or $5.00 USD (Kindle)

Purchase in print at: https://www.createspace.com/4407330

Also available in print and ebook at Amazon.com and other online retailers.

Keibooks

P O Box 516

Perryville, MD 21903 USA

<AtlasPoetica.org>

Still More Twitter Tanka

the first cold night
of August,
and the shirring of
crickets mourning
summer


I take
another bite
of the apple,
the gibbous moon
wanes a little


a morning
without sparrows
just the debris
of a long winter
tapping the window

the tips of 

the leaves of 

the chokecherry tree,

yellow in the 

summer rain

it’s another night

spent waiting for 

lightning

long past the season

for thunder

the bay breezes 

at cross currents with 

the wind off Bulle Rock;

so it is with

the affairs of men

orange needles

even pine trees

come at last

to the autumn

of their lives

if I wanted

to turn the world

upside down,

I’d be

a possum