Australian poet and novelist Cynthia Rowe (1938 to 2025) was a significant voice in the haiku, tanka, and haibun world in Australia and overseas.
Rowe was a genuine all-rounder, equally skilled across forms.
She won awards throughout her writing life, including, as she liked to recall, her first poetry prize at the age of ten, and had a wide publishing history in novels and short stories as well as in short form poetry.
Born in Melbourne and later residing in Sydney, Rowe was a generous member of the Australian short-form community, serving as president of the Australian Haiku Society for six years and was editor of FreeXpresSion‘s Haiku Xpressions from 2010 until her death.
The breadth of her achievements, however, should not distract readers from a close consideration of the quality of her work.
A few months after her death, it seems fitting to pause and examine some of the distinctive features of Rowe’s tanka.
Mike Rehling, an American short-form writer of haiku, senryu, and haibun, with many years of experience as an editor, has said of her: ‘Editors are not supposed to have ‘favorites’, but Cynthia was one of mine. Her work was always a finished product, but more importantly, she provided in her work a clear view into humanity and nature.’
This essay will focus on that ‘clear view’ and suggest how it is achieved.
Each of the tanka analysed here is shaped by a specific setting – a dance, an infant’s nursery, and the interior of a plane.
This essay seeks to demonstrate how Rowe brought her characteristic clear-sightedness to bear across such diverse contexts.
‘First gardenia’ seems an appropriate place to begin.
Rowe’s clarity of vision derives in part from the combination of social awareness and amused self-assurance that is a frequent feature of her writing.
This tanka draws on the speaker’s memory of herself as an ingénue at what was possibly her first dance.
The poem opens deftly with ‘first gardenia’, a phrase that immediately evokes fragrance, formality, and the memory of a first corsage – delicate and full of promise, like an embodiment of the speaker herself.
However, from this point the tone begins to shift.
first gardenia
I recall lapin jackets
winkle pickers
and the high school band
out of sync with my feet
(Eucalypt: a tanka journal, Issue 6, 2009)
The pivot after line one introduces mismatched moments from a long-past evening, giving increasingly clearer form and social nuance to the location.
The reference to ‘lapin jackets’ shows Rowe’s sharp ear for adolescent pretension.
The French descriptor for short rabbit-fur coats gently exposes a failed attempt to disguise the garments’ humble origins.
Whether the speaker’s wry awareness is immediate or retrospective remains uncertain – and that ambiguity is one of the poem’s subtle strengths.
The next remembered detail broadens the humour.
‘Winkle pickers’ are an item of footwear only those foolish enough to have worn them are likely to recall.
The name makes further description redundant.
Rowe rightly places them mid-tanka: a comic peak that neatly punctures the romantic tone set by the opening line.
The concluding lines turn delightfully back on the speaker.
The setting is firmly grounded with the mention of ‘the school band’ – Cinderella’s coach is now irredeemably a pumpkin.
But the moment of greatest gratification for the reader lies in the claim that the band was ‘out of sync’ with the speaker’s feet.
That glorious flash of youthful self-confidence sets the speaker apart.
In retrospect, it is open to debate who was truly out of step, but the adult Rowe seems as quietly admiring of her younger self’s sangfroid as she is amused by it.
The tanka is the work of a writer juggling a set of intermeshing rings – light social commentary and self-parody interwoven with a nostalgic acceptance of what she once was.
Before moving on from this tanka, it is worth noting Rowe’s quiet mastery of form.
Her lineation is classically correct, yet nothing feels forced or ornamental.
Every word earns its place, and the tanka reads with the natural ease of prose.
The shift and link between the opening line and its elaboration are integral to the insight it reveals.
Rowe’s clarity of vision in ‘first gardenia’ encompasses both social observation and humorous self-awareness.
In another register, that same clear-sightedness in ‘a curlew crying’ delineates what is deeply personal, familial, and existential:
a curlew crying
in the gathering darkness
reminds me of you
the first time I ventured
into the nursery
(First published in Eucalypt: a tanka journal, Issue 1, 2006
Republished in Driftwood, Ginninderra Press, 2015)
Mike Rehling attributes to Rowe a peculiarly ‘clear view’ of ‘humanity and nature’.
In ‘a curlew crying’, her understanding of both is demonstrated through the intersection of the natural world and a comparably significant human situation.
Lines one and two are powerful evocations of distress, vulnerability, and powerlessness.
The aural and emotional resonance of ‘a curlew crying’ suggests a disorienting, unanswerable plea for help – crossing species and echoing into deepening darkness.
The repeated cs and rs catch in the throat like a halting sob.
The sound renders the listener helpless, confronted with an urgent need to which she cannot respond.
Part of what gives the cry its emotional force is that it comes from a creature so irrevocably other.
The listener hears the pain but can neither find nor relieve it.
The pivot in line three transports the reader into another world: the ordered, domestic space of ‘the nursery’.
The shift is abrupt – from the wild, ungrounded cry of a bird to the courteous, measured language of human conversation: ‘reminds me of you’.
At first glance, it suggests a return to safety.
But lines one and two have already undercut that apparent security.
The urbanity of the phrase masks the speaker’s awareness that the person she is addressing may share the same elemental, irreducible distress embodied by the curlew.
The situational irony – embedding a moment of raw vulnerability within the language of polite reminiscence – underscores that connection.
Irrespective of location, the existential threat is the same.
The emotional atmosphere is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s Morning Song, in which the newborn’s nakedness ‘shadows’ his parents’ ‘safety’.
In this context, Rowe’s use of the verb ‘venture’ to describe her entry into the baby’s room is perfectly apposite – a quiet acknowledgment of the level of risk.
It is not incidental that both Rowe and Plath write in the second person, suggesting a partial barrier between parent and child, with the infant more vulnerable for being more removed.
In both poems, the façade of protection and order is stripped away to reveal the danger that lies beneath.
We are placed in extremis.
We – and those we love – frightened creatures in the dark.
This essay closes on a quieter, more reflective note, with a tanka that illustrates the breadth of Rowe’s perspective and the value she finds in what endures after moments of human aggrandisement.
‘No noise’, the final tanka to be discussed, was published in 2014 – more than a decade after the last flight of the world’s first supersonic passenger plane.
It occupies a characteristically insightful space: one that lies well past the fevered speculation that greeted the aircraft’s maiden flight and the subdued resignation that marked its retirement:
no noise
when the Concorde broke
the sound barrier
only the curved horizon
told me the earth was round
(Eucalypt: a tanka journal, Issue 16, 2014)
Both of the previous tanka were quietly retrospective.
This, though written entirely in the past tense, seems to exist in a moment outside of time.
The perspective seems to be that of a passenger on the plane, though this location is not fully revealed until the tanka’s last two lines.
The opening three lines describe a protracted moment of anticlimax or perhaps relief.
Readers who remember Concorde’s first flight in March 1969 will recall the widespread apprehension that preceded it.
There were fears that the sonic boom produced when the aircraft broke the sound barrier might injure people or damage structures on the ground.
These fears proved valid: however, the tanka focuses solely on the experience within the plane, where the passengers travelled in silence: ‘no noise / when the Concorde broke / the sound barrier’.
It creates a moment of encapsulation – those at the heart of the event protected from its consequences.
The image suggests not only physical insulation, but also emotional and moral distance – the kind that can accompany the enjoyment of technological progress.
Whether the speaker is fully aware of this protected position is difficult to determine.
The next line, however, clearly indicates that they perceive part of the larger truth the situation makes apparent.
The closing lines have a quiet, hushed beauty; they suggest a moment of unity and harmony on a planetary scale.
The technological triumph recedes, and what remains is a deeply human, almost timeless awareness.
The speaker, suspended above the earth, responds not to the noise of achievement but to the curvature of the horizon – the physical proof of the world’s wholeness.
‘Only the curved horizon / told me the earth was round’ reads less as discovery than as recognition: something both astonishing and serene, seen clearly at last from above.
These lines call to mind Carl Sagan’s description of Earth as a ‘pale blue dot,’ inspired by images captured by Voyager 1.
Both appreciate the Earth’s beauty from a great distance, but where Sagan emphasises its fragility, Rowe seems to glimpse the possibility of connection.
The tanka draws attention to the gentle curve of the horizon, in implicit contrast to the straight line it often presents from an earthbound perspective – a line that divides, here softened into something continuous and encompassing.
As demonstrated throughout this discussion, Rowe’s tanka take risks, drawing her reader into distinct social, temporal, physical and existential locations.
She trusts her reader to follow her into the 1950s, when winkle pickers enjoyed their brief, inglorious moment.
More significantly, she invites the reader to intuit both the strength and the vulnerability of a child-woman testing herself in those first social waters.
Rowe also trusts readers to step into the mid-1970s and discern both the pretension and the promise of a technology at the height of its social relevance and to take from that an insight of enduring significance.
These tanka demand an imaginative leap.
To return to Mike Rehling’s observation: tanka such as these are not possible without absolute sureness of touch.
Rowe sees and reveals with a high level of discernment.
Her vision is clear, yet never simplistic: she perceives not only surface detail but also the complexity beneath.
At her best, as in ‘a curlew crying’, Rowe compels the reader to realign their perspective and see aspects of the world and their place within it as they may never have considered them before.
In her tanka, clarity is foundational: Cynthia Rowe presents her insights sharply, resonantly, and without evasion.
Jo McInerney
Tanka Co-editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place