Guest Poet, Dr Tim Gardiner

Glow-Worm photos: © Vicky Quantrill 2020

I am delighted to introduce Dr Tim Gardiner to readers of The Glow of Emerald Light. David, my husband, and I first met Tim at a Poetry Cafe in Woodbridge, Suffolk, some eight years ago. My wildlife blog, Wild and Wonderful, had been running for about two years, and it was exciting to find a fellow poet who displayed a vast knowledge of the natural world (in a very modest way), and of insects, in particular.

Since then Tim has had books and numerous poems published. He is drawn to Japanese forms such as the Tanka, like the one he has provided for us here:

Jupiter oscillates

on canal water…

the constancy

of a glow-worm’s light

by the towpath

            © Tim Gardiner                                                                            

Previously published in: Ribbons 12.2, Journal of the Tanka Society of America

Tim's impressive CV of 'Insect Poetry' is listed here on the Essex Field Club website. Do take a look. Tim's entomological study, Glowing, Glowing, Gone? The Plight of the Glow-Worm in Essex, can be found here.  You can read more about Tim in his Poet Profile on the Haiku Foundation website here. His poetry collection, Wilderness, can be purchased here from Brambleby Books.   

I asked Tim to supply answers to the following three questions for us:

1.     What in your opinion is the appeal of the Tanka form? The appeal of tanka for me lays in its slightly longer five-line format than the standard three-line haiku. Well-written tanka can also be combined with prose, to form a powerful story-telling medium (tanka-prose) with limitless possibilities regarding content and length.  

2.    How did you become interested in glow worms? I saw my first glow-worm in my late teens, after a tip-off from Essex Wildlife Trust. My mind had been fired up by reading about them in a grasslands book by Chris Packham that I’d bought from a second-hand bookshop in Great Yarmouth. 

3.     What would you look for particularly in a short poem? As an editor, I’m looking for a minimal approach with every unnecessary syllable removed from the tanka. That’s where the resonance and emotional impact of the poem lies, between the words, the unsaid thing.

Thank you, Tim, so much for being Guest Poet. I would also like to extend my thanks to Vicky Quantrill for giving me the chance to use her Glow-Worm photographs in my fifth Photo Challenge.

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If you are reading this before 23.00 hrs on Wednesday 8 July 2020 (UK time) and would like to submit a 5-line poem in response to the Glow-Worm photographs, please click this link for the Photo Challenge page or return to the guidelines and rules by clicking here.

You may like to read about some five-line poetry forms here.

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