Hiromitsu Ogawa’s tanka work carries a title evoking Prague’s Charles Bridge. Through travel and foreign scenery, it expands postwar tanka’s field of vision from inwardness toward the outside world.

The name of a foreign bridge opens the field of tanka outward.

As the title suggests, this tanka work gathers details close at hand to look at self and time through everyday life. As a Tanka Kenkyu Prize winner, it shows the force of poems grounded in daily experience.

Small events close at hand become the texture of an era within the poems.