With the commandment against treating authors and their speakers as one and the same rarely heeded anymore, Yuki Tanaka’s Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon, 2025) is something of a throwback. As much a sequence of masks as a wardrobe of moods, any one guise might be discarded for another in quick fashion. “Our moods don’t believe in each other,” wrote Emerson, and it’s that easy changeability—a shrug of the shoulders or like a cape thrown off with carnival hauteur—that endears Tanaka to his reader. That is, except his people talk wrongly (“I’d say, ‘There is a boat and we are in it’”), with a tendency for obtuse phraseology (“an old wine bottle and behind it, / the arm of a woman,” “I laughed, making the air move”) that could only be intentional. The sensibility responsible for these poems, halfway between the homesickness of Ruth—the biblical widow and foreigner pitied by Keats—and the alienated musings of Antoine Roquentin, embraces neither wholeheartedly. Tanaka rides that middle zone where the two collide and blend:

Setting aside whether Tanaka’s soft-spoken dissociation is one Sartre might have recognized, seldom has the effect of estrangement been reenchantment; as an aesthetic strategy, the odds of estrangement leaving us either nauseous or lost in our own wonderment are as good as a coin flip. For a sizable percentage of us, however, the world is irrepressibly real. Even the special membrane surrounding an MFA program usually isn’t thick enough to keep it out, meaning that when budget cuts, state violence, and novel pathogens come knocking—singly or all at once—the expectation is that artists’ sensitive antennae are, like the flame on Auden’s lighter, flickering sympathetically (and that the artists themselves are signing a petition or two). Historically, surrealism has proven itself capable of upsetting power and telling truth—though power, as Noam Chomsky used to say, knows perfectly well what it’s doing. Poets may not be the legislators Shelley thought they were, but the noncommittal innocence of daydreaming, of being aloof and apart, remains a flattering trap.

Opening on a hospital prognosis, the news out of Chronicle of Drifting is by turns global and local; and, if the collection’s whimsical interrogatives and diaristic asides generally come across as indulgent rather than urgent (“Would you like a slice of pear or a slice / of amethyst? Both taste of nightmare, and we, // mice in silk kimonos, rustle across / a fragile bridge”), the mysteries of me, myself, and I are as likely to be revealed through play as through sensuality, which often lacks the weirding pressures of depth. Seen from beneath the water, by his own toes, Tanaka’s liquid face “streams, carrying dirt.” Earlier, hair dipped into a pond looks like squid ink dispersing in a glass. A born fabulist, Tanaka has the spirit of a foundling raised by Kipling (“Wolf skins kept us warm”) and Ovid, or Yakumo Koizumi, the Greek-born author responsible for Japan’s best-known kaidan (ghost stories and tales of the supernatural). In one poem, a man turns into a horse—the horse is probably a metaphor, for what you couldn’t say—while in another a ghost in an oleander bush drags on a cigarette in the rain. Something close to riddles continually mixes in, as though we were expected to guess the speaker’s identity: “I cannot fly. I jump and jump to imitate a bird. [. . .] At night I glint with long ears and peep through // a window misted with the steam from a teakettle, hoping they’ll let me in.” Perhaps due to Tanaka’s affection for a view of nature typically reserved for cartoons, the monster in question, “[p]erched on a wooden fence” clasping an umbrella, wouldn’t be out of place in a Studio Ghibli film.

Much of the poetry here has an antique charm, that of a wavy fairground mirror, mildly illusory without the ambition of actually tricking anybody, while others are given to the timorousness of seeming homespun. Of course, what’s risked with wisdom, or mannered displays of such, is a certain preciosity, whereas a “restless imagination,” as the back copy has it (a step up from kids’ active ones, presumably), might just tire itself out running through every topic under the sun. Tanaka is at his strongest holding a magnifying glass to life, in which “ants gather around a slowly loosening sugar cube” and “the smoke of myrrh circles” the eyes of a dying man. A peek at the notes tells us that Chronicle of Drifting was variously inspired, which explains his polyvocality. Those sources include an eighth-century anthology, artwork by Yeats’s brother, and turn-of-the-century photography, with the title borrowed from a work of collage art by the surrealist Kansuke Yamamoto. But instead of scraping the barrel of his subconscious and turning over every lurid stone, Tanaka erases his PhD dissertation. He also translates, both the work of other poets and for his own creative purposes. While the title works as a description of Tanaka’s journey through American higher ed (he now teaches at a university in Tokyo), what is actually chronicled is the drift of his thoughts, from the letters of Mishima and sunflowers to imaginary chauffeurs.

In a single poem, cats talk, a magician flirts with mermaids, and the war dead are a bit of an afterthought (the similes—“quiet as dry starfish,” or two unlit windowpanes compared with sleeping panthers—are mostly collateral damage). Pure fantasy notwithstanding, the emotional temperature throughout is seriocomic, with a healthy parallel to be drawn with the late Charles Simic. ​As with Simic, the inclusion of humor tempers Tanaka’s particular brand of irony, which, if not less cruel, is gently noticed, like a parent breaking bad news:

The book’s obsessions also come in on the lighter side, taking forms a child would recognize: persimmons and horses, butterflies and irises (“When he plucked an iris, I plucked the one next to it,” “I’d like you to fly through these irises”), so abundant you’d think you stepped into a lepidopterarium, whereas Tanaka’s titles occasionally feel as though they were pulled from a hat. Chalk it up to the Magrittean streak running through these poems that reveres irreverence, but in which an odd logic may be worked out.

If, as art’s previous century taught us, a musical composition can be written in the form of a pear and a painting of a caged egg titled Elective Affinities, who’s to say an aubade needs dawn?

Indeed, as if Tanaka’s plan was to avoid a neat symmetry, Chronicle of Drifting begins at midnight and ends not with the penultimate “Séance in Daylight,” but a nocturnal study of a wood pile that—like Frost’s, for years tidily rotting in a frozen swamp—“wished to be a stairway,” abandoned when its cutter’s attention changed. The distracted air of this collection, more dreamy than meditative (that would require a certain imagistic stick-to-itiveness), will be too thin an atmosphere for some; and yet, in what could be a metaphor for readers giving enervating attention to a heap of words, in contemplating that rain-damp cord, Tanaka asks for generosity and, like the ascendant moon, to imagine climbing it anyway.