Poet of Honour is a series of Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation’s celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who have become iconic and a major inspiration.

Cyril Dabydeen’s sense of displacement and a search for his identity in the collage of Canadian ‘mosaic’ or the ‘salad bowl’ multiculturalism through his poems are more an examination than any bitter outpouring. The old shoe has a character. And he tries to make it apparent to us no matter how much ‘the Empire’ of sun tries to blind us. Guyanese with Indian ancestry, and ever since winning Sandbach Parker Gold Medal before he was twenty, in 1964, Cyril has won critical acclaims and awards, including becoming the Poet Laureate of Ottawa, between 1984 and 1987. Few poets succeed as novelists as well. Recognised with the country’s most coveted awards, the Guyana Prize for Fiction, Cyril has proven he is also a great novelist. Here is a poet who has also fought for the freedom of his country, Guyana. Currently, he is also a judge for the Word Masala Foundation. We are very thrilled to honour Cyril with this much sought after citation our Poet of Honour.

-Yogesh Patel MBE

Three Poems by Cyril Dabydeen

A GOAT IN THE YARD

Moments in the sun when all is perplexity–
the same ochreous shape with variation of tones
or determination with an old shoe, leather
being more than an affectation in the breeze.

The clouds somersault, and the bewildered goat
is without a sense of oblivion: on grass, sawdust,
empty shells, rotten boards, shingles as I contemplate
an old shoe with a personality all its own.

The goat quickly moves forward, hooves scuffing
the sun without the sky’s imprint as I also cherish
hibiscus, broken petals on glass, leaves on the ground,
and imagine Noah at the crossroads all at once.

A semblance of rutted soil, my now being held
to one spot and about to start speaking in tongues
with a derelict stove, porcelain, potsherd, orchids
forming on buttressed roots setting the world afire!

A burning bush really when I’m thrust among
animals locking horns amidst the Hebrew flood;
the goat ruts hard from high ground, and
I look up with a sturdy glare, mesmerized

by the power an old shoe can muster. The goat
swaggers on blamelessly with a tufted beard,
amazed as I am at what else is transformed—
images down through the ages, not far away.

PIZARRO MEETS ATAHUALPA AGAIN

–Inca’s forbidden history

Meeting you eye to eye
as nothing else matters but
the ocean: a dreamer’s maze
with more than ruins; and
where else do I go? Now
who’s asking, not telling?

Cowering…because the Andes
mountains rise higher, what
keeps raising its head as time
no longer matters in Peru, or
some place else, and I will
keep asking: Who am I?

Not where do you go, or come from
because of conquest of tribes unknown;
helmeted Pizarro with silver
and gold becoming burdensome
more than before, what he will
now acknowledge.

What Atahualpa never bore alone;
so the story goes about the Emperor
of Inca-land, a never-ending tale
of woe told in the Spanish court
far from where rivers run
and mountains rise up.

Clouds coming down to the centre
of the earth, which neither
Ptolemy nor Copernicus saw
as men rode on horses before
a naked Inca girl, indeed what
the signs never foretold.

PRANAM

She comes to me with pranam,
clasping her hands together–
acknowledging who I am, and
where I might have come from
with ancestry at the crossroads.

My being from the subcontinent
no less she says with confidence;
and before I could reply she talks
about music, Irish only. Harmony
between Gaelic and Indian peoples,

what I now contend with, but know
little about with ragas, and musical
strains coming my way: melodies
of yesteryear, you see. What else
must I convince her about

with a rhythm my own, she will
insist upon as I take a familiar bow,
telling her who I really am, or now
intend being, like what she already
knew, her voice becoming a lilt

from bygone days with a choir
her own from Westminster Abbey
as she bids me farewell, and
I am left with a gesture only
of years gone by.

Cyril Dabydeen

Cyril Dabydeen–renowned poet, short story writer, novelist, anthologist, and book critic. He has written/edited twenty books. His work has appeared in over 60 literary magazines and anthologies, e.g. Poetry/Chicago, The Critical Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Canadian Literature, and in the Oxford, Penguin, and Heinemann Books of Caribbean Poetry and Fiction. He has read from his books internationally–across Canada, the US, UK and Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. He was the poet laureate of Ottawa (1984-87). He taught Writing at the University of Ottawa for many years.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Unique background and stellar writing.
-Fred D’Aguiar, Director of Creative Writing, Virginia Tech University, US

a mature and established voice…a fascinating writer to explore.
-British Journal of Canadian Studies

I know it’s like all your work, astute in politics and artful in poetics.
George Elliot Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada

Cyril Dabydeen

To read poets honoured previously here is a roll call; please click on the name.

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati

Vijay Seshadri

Pascale Petit

Imtiaz Dharker

Vidyan Ravinthiran

Poet of Honour is a series of Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation’s celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who have become iconic and a major inspiration.

One of the most esteemed literary critics, but a poet at heart, Vidyan has reached one of the most coveted seats in literature as an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. This achievement is more remarkable because Harvard had been notoriously accused of consistently rating Asian-American applicants lower. Recently, I was listening to the Poetry Foundation podcast featuring Vidyan and Vahni Capildeo, two extraordinary poets of English literature. To listen to them together was an intellectual feast. So, I am glad he joins our roll call of Poet of Honour. Vidyan’s poems have a strong sense of identity quest embedded in their narrative. They are where heritage, intellect, wit, Britishness, and search for being serious while placing us in the opposite world takes us on a journey of surprise and enlightenment. The meaning of the title of his collection, Grun-tu-molani, means “man wants to live”. He intellectually and emotionally shows us how. Yes, politics, violence, moral questions also stun us as in this poem. Just don’t run away, get consumed in his other poems and check out their belly!

-Yogesh Patel MBE

A Poem by Vidyan Ravinthiran

A new poem for Ars Notoria, based on an ancient Tamil folk tale. The original version is recorded in The Maze of Fantasy in Tamil Folktales by Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi.

Your demon’s basic

dilemma’s this
—as well as feeling all they hear
is either poison or their own

original thought,
otherness is something
they’ll never get their heads around;

since they wish to eat people,
it must be—given half a chance—
those same people would eat them . . .

Leaving for home,
a goatherd told his scarecrow
to watch out and not just for thieves

but tigers and demons too:
with emphasis, he said
not puli and muni but pulikili and munikini

—tigerish tigers and demonic demons!
One of each,
creeping in the shade toward their prey,

heard this and were terrified
by word of a beast
like them in every way but raised to a new power;

the tiger ran off and the demon
disguised himself as one of the goats.
Which was fooling nobody, least of all

—on the scene to sacrifice to Durgā—
Able-Talker and the Strong-Armed One.
The latter seized the demon-goat,

the former took one look, said, “thambi, something’s wrong.
This thing’s iffy: cut its throat!”
Hearing this, the demon fled the pair

back to his lair
where the gibing of his pals around the fire
got his blood up, and before

you could say, “the events of Black July, 1983”,
his mob were out for an eye for an eye,
beating, flames in hand, at Able-Talker’s door.

Which stayed locked tight. But through it
floated the loud, theatrical
voices of that smart bluffer and his wife:

“What became of those three demons
in the larder?”—“Your little boy
snacked on them before he went to bed!”

If a child ate three of their kind,
the parents would devour thousands! So the mob fled,
leaving that Tamil home unlooted and unburned.

Vidyan Ravinthiran

The child of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants, Vidyan Ravinthiran grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. He’s the author of two books of verse. Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) was shortlisted for several first collection awards, with individual poems appearing in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes.

Vidyan’s first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; his next, on Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He has put together editions of Indian poets (with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne, he’s currently editing an anthology of Sri Lankan poetry) and has published a range of both scholarly and journalistic articles.

Vidyan Ravinthiran

To read poets honoured previously here is roll call; please click on the name.

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati

Vijay Seshadri

Pascale Petit

Imtiaz Dharker

Poet of Honour is a series of Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation’s celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who have become iconic and a major inspiration.

Believe me; it is most difficult to write a front editorial note for someone of Imtiaz Dharker’s stature and her presence across the boundaries that is really the religion of literature! Her daughter Ayesha is the supreme example of there is nothing Muslim, Jews, Christians or Hindus about us at a level of our humanity as she dances across all religions on a variety of stages, taking her mother’s teaching aboard.

Art cannot afford the political pettiness or religious bigotry, so l am profoundly grateful that Imtiaz not only agreed to be a special guest for us to celebrate Christmas but also share as a special treat for you her trademark artistic expression in sketches. Merry Christmas! Please enjoy not only our usual Poet of Honour content but also her drawing, which she has generously sent to share with us on Christmas. So please celebrate Christmas with her, Phillip, and me.

-Yogesh Patel MBE

Three poems by Imtiaz Dharker

Lapis Lazuli

If you thirst for blue beyond ultramarine,
here is the blue that stains the artist’s hand,
lifted out of the most precious seam
in the generous heart of Badakshan

to place an azure light in the Pharaoh’s eyes
after he is gone, lap at the Virgin’s cloak,
seep into the masjid walls. A prize
to protect the wearer, allow the hope

that a simple ore could save the prey
and shield the savaged heart from harm;
that in a broken land it could find a way
to wrap the child in sacred blue, a charm

or talisman to still the approaching drone,
if you could only mine the prayer inside the stone.

Undone

That tongue of yours is silver when you speak
and silver when the speaking’s done.
Those eyes have a look that turns my quick
to silver and proves my body’s not my own
but away on loan to your fingers, bold
in their skilful wheeling and their dealing.
Your mouth the alchemist, I am gold,
blown through the eggshell of the ceiling
into a clear murano sky.
All that goes with me is the scent of you
which could be the scent of me, for there is no I
or you, flung as we are to glassy blue.
See how well I am undone
with one touch of your silenced silver tongue

The trick

In a wasted time, it’s only when I sleep
that all my senses come awake. In the wake
of you, let day not break. Let me keep
the scent, the weight, the bright of you, take
the countless hours and count them all night through
till that time comes when you come to the door
of dreams, carrying oranges that cast a glow
up into your face. Greedy for more
than the gift of seeing you, I lean in to taste
the colour, kiss it off your offered mouth.
For this, for this, I fall asleep in haste,
willing to fall for the trick that tells the truth
that even your shade makes darkest absence bright,
that shadows live wherever there is light.

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. Her six collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Luck is the Hook. Her poems have featured widely on BBC radio, television, the London Underground and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and also scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

‘Whether she writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus. She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.

Reading her, one feels that were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate’.
Carol Ann Duffy

http://www.imtiazdharker.com/

To read poets honoured previously here is roll call; please click on the name.

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati

Vijay Seshadri

Pascale Petit

Poet of Honour is a series of Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation’s celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who have become iconic and a major inspiration. This month we are thrilled to present Pascale Petit, who just won this year’s £5,000 inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry with Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books). Not forgetting that her this year’s collection Tiger Girl, depicting her grandmother, was also short listed for the Forward Prize. In the collection, Petit embraces her grandmother’s Indian heritage in the settings of the nature’s voice through subcontinent’s fauna and flora. As in her other collections, her voice is a santoor gently drifting and scattering droplets of music invoking soul’s delight.

-Yogesh Patel MBE

Three poems by Pascale Petit

credit Brian Fraser

For a Coming Extinction

(after W. S. Merwin)

You whom we have named Charger, Challenger,
Great King, and Noor the shining one,

now that you are at the brink of extinction,
I am writing to those of you

who have reached the black groves of the sky,
where you glide beneath branches of galaxies,

your fur damasked with constellations,
tell him who sits at the centre of the mystery,

that we did all we could.
That we kept some of you alive

in the prisons we built for you.
You tigers of Amur and Sumatra,

of Turkey and Iran, Java and Borneo,
and you – Royal Bengals, who lingered last.

Tell the one who would judge
that we are innocent of your slaughter.

That we kiss each pugmark,
the water trembling inside

as if you had just passed.
Masters of ambush and camouflage,

hiding behind astral trees,
invisible as always,

when we gaze up at the night,
when we look lightyears into the past –

we see your eyes staring down at us.

The Anthropocene

A bride wears a train
of three thousand
peacock plumes

She walks down the aisle
like a planet
trailing her seas

every wave an eye
shivering with the memory
of the display

how the trees turned
to watch as the bird
raised the fan of his tail –

emerald forests
bronze atolls
lapis islands

every eye
a storm
held in abeyance

Green Bee-eater

More precious than all
the gems of Jaipur –

the green bee-eater.

If you see one singing
tree-tree-tree

with his space-black bill
and rufous cap,

his robes
all shades of emerald

like treetops glimpsed
from a plane,

his blue cheeks,
black eye-mask

and the delicate tail streamer
like a plume of smoke –

you might dream
of the forests

that once clothed
our flying planet.

And perhaps his singing
is a spell

to call our forests back –

tree
by tree
by tree.

All poems are with permission from Bloodaxe Books

Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection, and a poem from the book won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018, and is shortlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. She published six earlier collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, she spent the first part of her life as a visual artist.

http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk

To read poets honoured previously here is roll call; please click on the name.

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati

Vijay Seshadri

Three poems by Vijay Seshadri

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry 2014

Poet of Honour is a series of our celebration of some of the best contemporary poets who are nothing but an inspiration. This month Ars Notoria is thrilled to present Vijay Seshadri, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2014. Vijay won the prize for his collection, 3 Sections, a “compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

-Yogesh Patel MBE

The Estuary

The brown bear living near the estuary,
and wading out when the tide swells and the salmon run,
during the days of the dwindling salmon runs,
and slapping with his big right paw a hook-nosed fish
whipsawing inland to spawn,
the ambidextrous bear,
furred like the forest from which he emerged,
waddling into the unteachable waters
to swat the salmon out the fast-running tide
and catch the red salmon in his mouth
and toss and juggle the sockeye salmon
thrashing and drowning in the air—
and when he’s expressed himself completely
he catches with his jaw the self
that swam ten thousand miles to the estuary
and daintily, mincingly, with one paw grasping
the caudal fin and the other the head,
eats that salmon as if he were we
and the fish an ear of boiled corn—
that bear is a bear about whom rich and complicated
feelings can be felt. That is a bear from whom ideas
about the state of nature can be derived.
Cruelty is the wrong word to describe
the pleasure he gets from playing with his lunch.
Play and life are the same thing to him,
art and life, life and death.
Creation impinging on a consciousness
clear and crystalline. Pinpoint revelatory
explosions unsoiled by words, unbesmirched.
Creation clambering out of the waters,
shaking itself off, creation
surrounding itself with itself. . . .
Stay down on the pavement where you just fell in a heap
like a bag of laundry, just stay there. Move even a
little and you might damage something else.
You’ve already done plenty of damage.
Stay down, supine. Stay down,
and let the giant buildings loom over you, let them
in their abstract imperium stun you with their indifference.
Wasn’t that the reason you built them in the first place?
Stay down, stay down, and ask yourself:
“Could I be the bear in this fable?”
“Could I be the fish?”
“Could I be whoever is imagining all this?”

First published in The New Yorker in June 2020

Meeting (Thick)

I’ll meet if you really want to meet,
I’ll even meet in some small café or some
park across the way, but I won’t meet for long,
and not for a minute will I look at you in your isolation,
your human isolation. Looking at yours makes me look at mine—
transparencies of each other are they, yours and mine—
and I don’t have time for mine, so how could I have time for yours?
When I knew you, I had time for mine.
When I knew you, imagining my skeletal streaming
solitary oceanic swimming enlarged my dignities.
Not anymore. No time for the nostalgias, infinite, infinitesimal,
and the ones in between. No time to pretend I can sustain anyone or
even understand how they feel—to show, by the grave,
downward turn of the face, the haunted eyes,
the image of an impossible inward stricken empathy.
The contradictions are unsupportable,
and I don’t have time to not support mine,
so how could I not support yours, too?
I don’t even have time to write this text.
See how uninflected it is, without rhetoric,
expatiation, form, concreteness, geography, weather, flora, fauna,
plain and bare (which shows you that I’m sincere)—
no Denali, no Great Rift, no seven-year trillium,
and not one phoebe in the woods getting ready to sing.

Thunderstruck

The house collapsed and I was crushed under the rubble,
pulverized, but here I am,
walking around as if I were alive—

the swain,
with an oxeye daisy in my buttonhole,
the bitter voluptuary, never satisfied,
the three-legged dog,
the giant under the tiny parasol at
the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,
the only Abyssinian in the choir of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church.

(Somebody must have done a self-portrait of me.)

Just amazing. I think I could wrap my arms all the way around
the 24,901-miles-circumferenced Earth.

Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, and went to America as a small child. He is the author of the poetry books “Wild Kingdom,” “The Long Meadow,” “The Disappearances,” (Harper-Collins India), “3 Sections,” and “That Was Now, This Is Then”, as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been widely published and anthologized and recognized with a number of honors, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

www.pulitzer.org/winners/vijay-seshadri

Please click on the name to visit poets honoured so far:

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati

Afterwardness

An eleven year old boy from Aleppo
whose eyes hold only things no longer there
– a citadel, a moat, safe rooms of shadow,
‘afterwardness’ in his thousand yard stare –

years later, decades even, might turn around
to see, through the long tunnel of that gaze,
a yard, a pond and pine trees that surround,
as in a chaharbagh, four branching pathways.

Where do memories hide? the pine trees sing.
In language of course, the four pathways reply.
What if the words be lost? the pine trees sigh.

Lost, the echo comes, lost like me in air.
Then sing, the pathways answer, sigh and sing
for the echo, for nothing, no one, nowhere.

Afterwardness (Carcanet 2019)

Ghazal: It’s Heartache

When you wake to jitters every day, it’s heartache.
Ignore it, explore it, either way, it’s heartache.

Youth’s a map you can never refold,
from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it’s heartache.

Follow the piper, lost on the road,
whistle the tune that led him astray: it’s heartache.

Stop at the roadside, name each flower,
the loveliness that will always stay: it’s heartache.

Why do nightingales sing in the dark?
Ask the radif, it will only say ‘it’s heartache’.

Let khalvati, ‘a quiet retreat’,
close my ghazal and heal as it may its heartache.

Child: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press 2011)

Come Close

Come close the flower says and we come close,
close enough to lift, cup and smell the rose,
breathe in a perfume deep enough to find
language for it but, words having grown unkind,

think back instead to a time before we knew
what we know now. When every word was true
and roses smelt divine. What went wrong?
Long before the breath of a cradle song.

Some lives fall, some flower. And some are granted
birthrights, a verandah, a sunken quadrant
of old rose trees, a fountain dry as ground
but still a fountain, in sense if not in sound.

Like a rose she slept in the morning sun.
Each vein a small blue river, each eyelash shone.

Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and has lived most of her life in London. She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She was poet in residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships with the Royal Literary Fund at City University and at the International Writing Program in Iowa. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a major Arts Council Writer’s Award. She is the founder of The Poetry School, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. Her most recent collection, Afterwardness (Carcanet 2019), a series of Petrarchan sonnets, is a Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

http://www.mimikhalvati.co.uk/