First Annual Festival of Women's Poetry *********************November 2008*********************

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First Annual Festival of Women's Poetry *********************November 2008********************* :: *International section :: Women poets from around the World :: Australia :: Amelia Fielden

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Topic: Amelia Fielden (Read 215 times)

moira
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Amelia Fielden
« Thread Started on Aug 19, 2008, 11:48am »

Amelia Fielden

Amelia Fielden was born 1941 in Sydney, Australia. She is a professional translator of Japanese and dedicated amateur poet. She has five grown children, six grandchildren, two labradoodles, one husband.

Five books of her own poetry have been published, the most recent is a collection of 400 tanka in sequences, Baubles, Bangles & Beads, published by Ginninderra Press,Canberra,2007.

Her work include twelve books of Japanese tanka by contemporary poets which she has translated or co-translated. The most recent, Ferris Wheel : 101 Modern & Contemporary Japanese Tanka, co-translated with Kozue Uzawa, published by Cheng & Tsui, Boston, 2006, was awarded the Donald Keene Prize for Translation of Japanese Literature, by Columbia University, New York.

Amelia Fielden's 2008 translation publications include Kaleidoscope, an anthology of the tanka of Terayama Shuji (Hokkuseido, Tokyo), Cicada Forest by Mariko Kitakubo (Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo), and Doorway to the Sky, by Noriko Tanaka.

Released in October 2008 by Modern English Tanka Press is In Two Minds, a collection of responsive tanka by Amelia and a fellow Australian poet, Kathy Kituai.

Baubles, Bangles & Beads: Threaded tanka
by Amelia Fielden

ISBN 978-1-74027-409-8
Published by Ginninderra Press
Reviewed by Moira Richards

What I enjoy most about Amelia Fielden’s poetry is the broad variety of subjects over which her tanka range – politics, pets, family, travel – all these and much more. Her latest book, Baubles, Bangles & Beads reads as a richly textured tapestry of the life and loves of the poet.

As an admirer of both Amelia’s skill with the tanka form and also of her extensive knowledge and understanding of Japan, the Japanese language and the evolution of tanka, I was most of all curious to read the tanka Amelia writes about her writing of tanka. She presents in her collection one set of sixteen tanka under the title “In My Tanka World” and includes in it such wry reflection as this, from one whose life is perhaps never without a tanka somewhere nearby,

meditation class
with the overhead fans
tick tick ticking –
am I the only one
plotting out poems
pg 56 (In My Tanka World)

And even when she writes a different set of tanka about another of her life’s passions, swimming, it seems that Amelia cannot but welcome the intrusion of tanka

I kick away
composing in my head
a tanka which
may not be so buoyant
when we leave the water
pg 50 (Still Swimming: I Inland)

Baubles, Bangles & Beads also includes many sets of tanka that record Fielden’s travels around Japan. A visit to the attractions of the country’s famous and ancient historic city of Nara inspires a tanka about tanka ...

far below
the Byakugo hill temple
Nara unfolds
dazzling, elusive
as Japanese tanka
pg 66 (Nara Time)

... and surely this visit to another Japanese city has evoked its own allusion to tanka poetry –

harbour liners
glide past bonsai islands
while I sip tea
turning the bowl to admire
its familiar foreign form
pg 65 (Fragments from a Fukuoka Day)

Tanka poetry seems not to be a solitary pastime for Amelia Fielden. Through it she has found interaction and friendship with other poets and often, she bows to their craft in her poems,

poet Kawano had
so much more than I
grandchildren
literary fame
a lump in her breast
pg 57 (In My Tanka World)

outside the wind
roars and rattles while
Mariko stands
in an eye of stillness
giving life to her tanka
pg 57 (In My Tanka World)

Amelia is also well-known for the assistance she gives to many Japanese poets with the translation of their work into English. The next poem gives some insight into the joy of such collaboration as well as to the complexities involved in the rendering of a short song into the same short song, but in a very different language and grammar.

from the air
Alaskan lakes: ‘green’, says
my Japanese friend
‘turquoise blue’, say I
and we laugh together
pg 76 (With Ninety-three Japanese Poets)

And perhaps many other poets draw the same strength from their art that Amelia gives words to here,

when I am
emotionally adrift
I reach for
the rock of tanka,
write myself steady
pg 56 (In My Tanka World)

Baubles, Bangles & Beads is a chapbook of threaded tanka – tanka grouped carefully together by the poet into meaningful strands. Too late, I fear that I may have not done those strands justice by drawing from them here a cross-thread, as it were. But now that would have to be another review

Short Songs
By Amelia Fielden

ISBN: 1-74027-188-2
Published by Ginninderra Press
Reviewed by Moira Richards

I should perhaps briefly explain the tanka form, but where to start? Although these poems are written in a mere five lines, the theories surrounding them would surely fill more than that many shelves of books. Amelia Fielden, who is fluent in both English and Japanese, explains in her prefatory essay that ‘tanka’ translates from Japanese to ‘short song’. And perhaps that is enough for a reader to know in order to begin an enjoyment of Fielden’s poetry.

Tanka are typically untitled so the poet needs to fit her entire thought into its five lines as here;

your soft breathing
as I drift into sleep,
your soft breathing
as I wake to birdsong
and our rhythm of love
(pg 14)

Did you too, hear Fielden’s love song in that short poem? She is accomplished in this art of capturing life’s experiences into a small lyrical snippet of words. Her poems touch on her feelings about various aspects of her life, her friends, children, people she meets and sometimes her songs are coloured with the bad of the world too;

terrorism
spreading, exploding
fear, violence –
and my roses bloom more
beautiful than before
(pg 15)

Tanka poets also often use the form to create word pictures of the world about them, and Amelia Fielden is adept at capturing sights that not everyone might have noticed;

in the rain
at the traffic lights
young woman
struggling with a child,
her back to the rainbow
(pg 27)

Although not often employed, there is room in the tanka form for the use of metaphor, and Amelia’s subtlety with the device is a delight;

almost full,
the moon sailing fast
through autumn
rough seas of cloud-waves
above the drowned stars
(pg 32)

But perhaps you’ve always thought that tanka was mostly a matter of fitting a poem into a strict 5/7/5/7/7 syllable pattern? Amelia Fielden writes some tanka like that too. If you don’t notice the syllable count when you read this one, then chances are you’ll agree with me that she has succeeded in writing her poem to transcend rather than be bound into its form;

one night long ago
our mother kimono-clad
do you remember
star-flake snow falling, drifting
onto her black lacquer hair
(pg 44)

Amelia Fielden’s Short Songs contains more than a hundred tanka in a range of styles and moods that I’ve merely been able to touch on here, as well as some titled three or four tanka sequences in which the poet has room to explore a chosen theme more fully. The book includes too, a short essay on the tanka form and its 1300-year history and should be enough to whet most readers’ appetite for more tanka by this poet. It will no doubt also inspire some readers to take out their own ‘short song’ brushes.

« Last Edit: Oct 19, 2008, 7:57pm by shayepoet »

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