Listen closely to the poems of Joy McCall and you’re sure to hear the echoes; the singing of dunnocks, the howling of wolves and the bleating of deer, each calling to us from over the hedges and across the fields of a sprawling ancient landscape. It was these voices from the past that first attracted me to Joy’s writing. Indeed, to cast an eye over the hedgewitch’s verse is to amble over exposed roots, to tread ancestral pathways and find ourselves in softly-lit clearings, where the age-old beliefs still reveal themselves in custom and ritual. I feel extremely fortunate to have wandered into Joy’s neck of the woods. And it’s under these green canopies that Joy continues to bottle the restless winds. These past few years, she has not only found a fresh vessel in the four lines of ryuka but has also breathed new life into this beguiling poetic form. These folk songs of the Ryukyu Kingdom, once composed to be sung with accompaniment from the three-stringed sanshin and traditionally written with an 8-8-8-6 syllable pattern, seem to have waited patiently over the centuries for Joy’s arrival. And now that the form and the poet have finally been united, the moss is free to drape its carpet over each line, the spiders can weave their webs in the hollows of each letter and the mice may find new hiding places in-between each carefully laid word… stay safe small ones, sleep safe. Liam Wilkinson tanka and ryuka poet June 2020