Cool Announcement: Spring's First Caress: Tanka by Brian Zimmer

The leaf does not grasp or grieve its last day.

-- Brian Zimmer

My Dear Readers:

I'm happy to share with you this good news:  Brian Zimmer's first book of largely-unpublished tanka had been edited by Jill Rauh and Kay L Tracy and published by Kay L. Tracy, following his death in 2014. Spring's First Caress is the first in a series of poetry books and contains the tanka he wrote between 2008 and 2010. "These mostly unseen poems allow us to meet the poet in the intimacy of his private world; a world few of us were privileged to know while he was alive" (M. Kei, editor of Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka).

About the Author:

Brian Zimmer wrote from the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. His work had appeared in various international print and online journals. He took inspiration from a variety of sources, including the ancient Japanese poetic-diary (utanikki) and free-form, poetic "essay" (zuihitsu).

Brian was one of early supporters of NeverEnding Story and contributed the following tanka as a gift for its readers. It was published on  January first, 2013, on which NeverEnding Story was founded.

no abacus
for the task
ahead
where the mists part
I begin counting stars

Excellent Tanka, 7th International Tanka Festival Competition, 2012


Selected Tanka:

not for whom
but with whom I write
these lines:
the skipping stone
the creaking tree house

infants' cemetery
the soft white
of fallen snow
blankets the grave
of her cradled loss

this grief

not the grief expected
no tears
just miles of sand
and endless desert

the white rose
unpetals
at my touch
even death's perfection
fleeting

casting on the river
for an image
to rest me --
minnows sleeping
on the moon