Böcker av Amelia Fielden

It was during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-601) that China first introduced tea to Japan, but the gentle art of tea drinking did not fully take root until the Southern Song Dynasty (AD 1127-1279) when a Japanese monk called Eisai returned from the Zhejiang Province, bringing with him the seeds for the first plantations and the principles of the Tea Culture. Eisai's book on the subject, Kissa Y¿j¿ki, began with the sentence 'Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one's life more full and complete.' Building on another ancient tradition, utamonogatari (poem stories), Amelia Fielden brings us Mint Tea from a Copper Pot & other tanka tales. Coming from 'a nation of tea-drinkers', I do not underestimate the significance of this everyday tradition. A cup of tea is curative, calming, ceremonial. For many of us, it is almost an act of ritual. It can be solitary, meditative, but like a memory, allowed to steep a while, it is made for sharing. It is comfort in a crisis, or while we wait for news. In her tanka tales, Amelia Fielden invites us to partake of these recollections of a long life, well-lived, a life filled with love, loss and longing; whether we are sipping Ceylon tea from porcelain cups in Japan, orange pekoe from the best china in an English country garden, mint tea behind wrought-iron gates and bolted cedar doors in the midst of a Moroccan revolution, or green tea in a temple precinct as we contemplate a dancing black butterfly, we are fully involved in Amelia's experience. Moreover, the eponymous mint tea from a copper pot is the image that permeates the collection and lingers long after it is finished. Mint: sharp, tantalising, refreshing, so exciting to the palate. Copper: the metal that redoubles the richness of a flame's reflection. The poet's mind is a fire bowl for memory, the 'sunset fire' that 'flares above the charcoal mountain rims'. This is a collection to savour and to return to again and again.Claire Everett, Tanka Prose Editor, Haibun Today, Editor, Skylark Tanka Journal

Early mornings, there's a busy twittering, singing, squawking from all sorts of birds as they start their day. Late at night, I hear the sighing of the surf and thumping of the waves on Coniston Beach in the middle distance, and frogs kero-kero-ing in the garden ponds. In between, are my adagio days.

The tanka form, in which these short lyrics on nature were composed, is that of traditional Japanese poetry. In classical Japanese, the expression meaning 'leaves', kotonoha, is a homonym for 'words'. Both are also written identically, in Kanji characters which join 'say' with 'leaf/leaves'. Kotonoha can also refer to waka, the pre-modern designation for tanka poems.

'In the tanka tradition, Amelia shares the personal in her life, yet offers her human adventure in a universal manner. Her readers will recognise their own lives in the specifics of the life Amelia has shared in her tanka. Also, she respects the tanka tradition of writing lyrical poems. Read out loud her tanka for yourself and/or recite for loved ones and friends so that you (and they) will hear the song-like quality of her verse.' - Neal Whitman