History

The Art of Implication
Tanka: Poems in Exile, by Jun Fujita (Covici-McGee company.)

Readers of Poetry and one or two other periodicals in which the best contemporary verse appears have been for some time familiar with the poetry of Jun Fujita, a young Japanese poet residing in Chicago when he is not living in the wilderness of the dunes in some such surroundings as are shown in the picture of him which we reproduce in this issue. Such readers will be glad to know that Mr. Fujita has now made his first collection of poems, and the publishers, recognizing its unusual quality, have entrusted the printing of the book—in a limited edition—to Will Ransom.

The result is a very beautiful format for this verse, verse which one would call delicate if it were not that it is then the ephemeral delicacy of so much contemporary verse. Many but not all of these poems are done in a very short form, and their perusal shows how vain is the occidental effort to write in Japanese forms when the writer's idea of those forms is confined to the knowledge that they contain so many syllables. For the important thing about these poems is not what they say in syllables that are there, but what they imply without the use of any words at all. They are poems which ask that the reader shall become a poet and complete them—rather extend them—for himself. For while each poem is as complete as the circle made by a stone thrown into still water, the circle keeps expanding in the imagination of the sympathetic reader. Here is an instance of the sort of thing we mean:

The majority of these poems deal with the landscapes of the dunes, and Mr. Fujita shows an extraordinary power of evoking a whole landscape with it's emotional suggestions, from words as economically used as is the single line of the master etcher. He begins with winter and carries us thru the four seasons. Here, from the autumn poems, is an example of the poet's sensitivity to the faintest overtones of the varied life of the dunes:

But interspersed among these poems of solitude are other of a personal nature, others of these poems appear in the last section of the book. Here is one of them:

And among these later poems are a number of impressions of Chicago. Perhaps the best of the, however, and one that on the scale of the others ranks as a long poem is "My Sister."

While these poems were written and published at various times they form in their present arrangement an impressive unity, not only in that they are the poems of an exile, tho certainly not unhappy exile, but that they display an interesting pattern of moods, a distillation after distillation of the poet's experience, until only a clear and potent elixir remains.

—Llewellen Jones.