Walking Widdershins: An Ode to Joy

Walking Widdershins is comprised of 108 sets of collaborative tanka, a genre of Japanese short-form poetry more ancient than haiku. Historically, tanka were often exchanged between two poets as a kind of poetic conversation. The tanka conversations in this volume were written over the course of a single year and reflect the poets' rootedness in the places where they live, their love for the natural world, and their concern for the havoc the human species is wreaking upon it. In his 'Afterword,' David C. Rice, tanka poet & editor, asks "If the root problem of our planetary crisis is that we see ourselves as separate from the natural world, not just another part of it, couldn't two poets writing together offer poems that would help connect us with the natural world in ways an individual poet could not accomplish?" Four original, full-color mandala illustrations allow readers to visually enter and interact with the poetry. Read more