James Roderick Burns

While going through my shelves, I came across this slim volume of James Rod Burns' tanka - I made the mistake of opening it randomly and just like that, my tidying mission was abandoned. I settled down for a quiet reread of this vignettes of cityscapes, loss, minutiae, tedium, emptyiness and I remembered why I loved it the first time. It's quite a painful read - there's a lot of sadness in these pages - but expressed in unexpected language and images. Deserves a wider audience.