Drops from Her Umbrella
Laura Maffei's first collection of tanka is excellent. A long-time editor of one of the best tanka journals in North America, American Tanka, Ms Maffei holds a B.A. from SUNY-Binghamton and M.A. and MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked as a technical writer, a corporate communications specialist, and a teacher of literature and writing at various US colleges and universities. No denizen of the musty stacks, however, Ms. Maffei is a poet of the quotidian, the domestic; a poet of nature and relationships. Her mastery of the form allows her to pare the traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern down to an even more abbreviated poem, and she likes to experiment with the distribution of stress and placement of long and short lines. Likewise, she often abandons the bipartite construction familiar to readers of haiku and senryu, in favor of continuous syntax. In each poem, however, she delivers an extreme close-up or bon mot or subtle surprise that makes us smile in recognition:my neighbourplays his guitarthrough the walland I am three chordsless lonely(p. 84)*how much laundryis too much?the dark tangleof many sleevesinside the machine(p. 46)That second tanka could almost be an ars poetica: the movement from literal image to metaphor is subtle and arresting, invites many interpretations. Vive the extra two lines on the haiku, I say. Sometimes it allows the poet that little extra breathing space and those precious extra words, so that she s not forced to squeeze an epiphany out of the juxtaposition of meagre phrase and fragment; sometimes, however, she achieves the concision of haiku regardless:gravestonesin a new cemeteryhow deeplyeach letter of each nameis cut(p. 89)The poet's line breaks, rhythmic control, and timing are impeccable.The book is divided into five sections: Office Job, Infant Batman, One Leg Unshaved, Chalk Dust, and Summer of Nipples. Together, as one critic has pointed out, they comprise a memoir of sorts. Nice trick that. I suspect the poet has done a lot of winnowing to come up with such a gallery of telling portraits. --Richard Stevenson, Three Books From Inkling Press; PoetryReviews.ca, April 24, 2007Well over a hundred tanka from the editor ofAmerican Tanka, with one or two pieces per page. There is an interesting, eclectic array of tanka, with affectionate glimpses of visits to the poet's parents, her life with her husband, the hours at the office and many other themes. There are some excellent observational pieces, as is shown by this finely-drawn one, with its enviable tightness and succinctness:sunny dayunexpectedlya hearsein my rear-view mirrorand the long line behind itHere is another graphic example, which captures the described situation so ably:how my tongue is tiedyears after graduationtrying to speak wellover the telephonewith an old professorWhere Laura Maffei is particularly good is in her acute observation of women; here are three representative examples:on the walk homethe woman in front of mehas the slit of her skirtand the slit of her sliplined up perfectly*that woman'sfashionable brown shoesthe rednesswhere they're cutting herjust above the instep*womenour handbagstouchingas we jostle each otherdown the ferry steps--Alan Hardy,New Hope International, December 14, 2007In the best way of contemporary poets who work in form, Laura Maffei has taken the tanka and made it her own. This collection functions as a poignant yet clear-eyed memoir in tanka, juxtaposing the sensual with the workaday, mordant social commentary with the hope--and sometimes the reality--of ferocious intimacy. The poet writes:my neighbor/ plays his guitar/ through the wall/and I am three chords/ less lonely; having recognized our own complicated experiences in these poems, we too come away from this collection feeling both imagistically satisfied and much less lonely. --Moira Egan,Cleave,Bar Napkin Sonnets