Gusts
Published by Penumbra Press
Order Info: Penumbra Press, Box 940,
Manotick, Ontario, Canada  K4M 1A8
or Penumbra Press Online
Phone: (613) 692-5590   Fax: (613) 692-5589
10.2 x 15.2 cm, 112 pages, ISBN 0-921254-86-5, $14.95, 1998
Table of Contents

Bluger's poems are elegant and spare. They are also pure, powerful and uncompromisingly modern. Although Japanese poets have been writing tanka for more than a millennium, Gusts is the first book-length collection of tanka published in Canada.

Marianne Bluger is an award-winning poet with many books to her credit. Since the late sixties, when she was married to a Zen master, she has been experimenting with Japanese forms. Her most recent work, Tamarack & Clearcut, is a significant and beautiful collection of haiku. Professor Sanford Goldstein, a gifted tanka poet in his own right, founding editor of Five Lines Down, the influential American tanka magazine, and translator of Tangled Hair (Akiko), Red Lights (Mokichi), and several other classics of modern Japanese literature, has been a mentor and sometime editor in the compilation of this book.

To read Bluger's tanka is to experience a fresh aesthetic and to feel the quickening of one's own heart. Each fleeting moment is captured with passion, precision and eloquence. As Judith Fitzgerald has written of Bluger's earlier lyric work, "whether she examines natural phenomena or illuminates human nature, it is abundantly clear that a powerful sensibility is at work in these poems." About her poetry, Louis Dudek has said, "I'm absolutely floored, delighted and enthralled. The quality is so good throughout ... the language so fine." Don MacKay has said, "It is a joy to have Gusts, and in such a splendid format."

Marianne Bluger resided in Ottawa, where she was a regular contributor to the lively arts community.