Poet of Honour: Hugo Williams

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, has celebrated our best contemporary poets so far in its first portfolio. These are the poets we should have read by now. If you have not by now, then please catch up with them. The culture matters, but poetry matters even more! These poets are iconic and our major inspiration. This is an essential assemble of poets. Sod Marvel or DC; these are the real superheroes of poetry!



I will always treasure my long conversation with Hugo Williams. It was overlaid in the noise of a book-launch party at poet Sarah Wardle’s flat. Hugo is hardly wordy in expressing himself, and as in his extensive output of poetry, he is a soft poet who has been spot on with his clarity of expression, a demand that he has constantly subjected himself of in his poems. He doesn’t like my penchant for experiments. So, he will never publish me. That’s okay. He tells me; it is something that Byron would do. For Byron, I would stop there with experimentation! I laugh. His clarity, which could harbour a poetic tradition, also extends to clear views on poets and editors we discussed. On my receiving an MBE, he commented, you have arrived. Well, whatever that means, my experience remains unique: I remain an outsider.

Billy’s Rain, a ‘darkly funny’ account of an extra-marital love affair that ‘had ended’, won him the T. S. Eliot prize, followed by the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. The readers who prefer an emotional outpouring over a well-tuned poem were dismissive at Goodreads! It raises a question: why must poetry surrender to such emotional demands? In his poems, we journey into a self-reflective style that may seem simple, but you are never away from some elements stirring and lurking as an undercurrent allowing us to experience something complex. Through his “I”, he is not in the business of unloading his wisdom on us; instead, he offers a candid study of himself, wry and witty in delivery. It is said that with his milieu in theatre, he can be theatrical with his lines! I am not looking for that tone; hence, I don’t find that theatrical performance there. Recently, I read his poem in our iconic, my blind recommendation, The London Magazine, where light plays tricks. Maybe that is the drama!

There have been copyright issues and so, sometimes my choices of poems have been limited, but my Poets of Honour have, undoubtably, confirmed their unquestionable craft. With Hugo, I salute them all.

Goodbye for now

With this New Year extra on Hugo, I am bowing out fleetingly. The first portfolio of the ‘Poet of Honour’ has been a great success and has taken poetry to parts other such beers have not! Such curtain call leads to other projects, and I invite you to join me at the in-person Poetry in the Park event to defy Covid-19 to meet me along with one of our extraordinary Poet of Honour Martina Evans and one of the exciting young poetic voices of the day Tristram Fane Saunders, in a unique park that features in my recent poetry collection, The Rapids, which I hope you have got hold off! Did I say Byron earlier? Well, to celebrate his birthday, please book your place here.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Hugo Williams

Blue Angel

With what tender brave wounds
her version of Blue Angel
sheds unlikely tears,
welling in sudden waves
from some forgotten source.
The piano’s rippling sobs
answers each helpless phrase
as if they were my own.
0 night of fading fields
and children’s sleep,
become that blessed place
where broken songs are mended,
I would pay good tears
to hear blue angel smile.


The Story So Far  

man standing on tree branch during sunset
Photo by Lukas Rodriguez on Pexels.com

At this point in the story
all we can say for sure
is that one of us goes on ahead
to explore the difficult terrain
where everything remains to be seen,
while the other stays home,
tossed this way and that
on the cross-currents of memory.
There’s no such thing as a plot.
We climb up into the fork
of the tallest tree
and kick the ladder away.
We can see clearly from here,
but we may need some help with the ending.


THE HALF-OPEN DOOR

green plants
Photo by Irina Iriser on Pexels.com

Walk along slowly
letting the rain come down
on head and shoulders,

or turn up my collar,
make a dash for it
and get wet all over?

Such were my thoughts
as I opened the front door
and almost went outside.

I feel like braving the weather
and making the most
of a free morning,

but the light has changed
and the air feels colder now
in the half-open door.

Hat or umbrella?
Raincoat or windbreaker?
It’s hard to be sure

when the sun is shining
and rain is falling
from a clear blue sky.

Getting ready to go out,
time passes quickly.
Suddenly it’s too late.


The Spare Room

We go back a long way, you and I,
on a mattress in the back of a van,
being thrown back and forth
on the bumpy Welsh roads,
but having to wait
till we got to your parents’ house
where we were supposed to be staying the night
before somebody’s wedding.

You showed me into a freezing spare room
with a single iron bedstead,
`just to see the look on your face’,
then burst out laughing.
We go back a long way, you and I.
I wish we could go there now.

<strong>Hugo Williams</strong><br><br>Williams’s poems engage themes of childhood, personal memory and sexuality with a plainspoken yet wry voice. In an interview with The Guardian, Williams discussed the autobiographical element of his work, stating, “You really can't start if you're not going to be completely honest. “<br><br>Williams is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including West End Final (2009), Collected Poems (2002), Billy’s Rain (1999), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Selected Poems (1989), and his Eric Gregory Award–winning debut, Symptoms of Loss (1965). A selection of his freelance writing appears in the essay collection Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet (1995). His additional honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Cholmondeley Award. His most recent book is Lines Off.
Hugo Williams

Williams’s poems engage themes of childhood, personal memory and sexuality with a plainspoken yet wry voice. In an interview with The Guardian, Williams discussed the autobiographical element of his work, stating, “You really can’t start if you’re not going to be completely honest. “

Williams is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including West End Final (2009), Collected Poems (2002), Billy’s Rain (1999), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Selected Poems (1989), and his Eric Gregory Award–winning debut, Symptoms of Loss (1965). A selection of his freelance writing appears in the essay collection Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet (1995). His additional honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Cholmondeley Award. His most recent book is Lines Off.




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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig

Raymond Antrobus

Keki Daruwalla

Mona Arshi

Christopher Reid

Ruth Padel


Poetry Books of the Year 2021

Our Poets of Honour nominations for the best poetry collections of the year for you to enjoy

 

To support the books that missed out on awards, I had stipulated a condition to avoid the year’s award-winning books. However, it was still left open to our honoured poets to choose freely. Because these selections are not submission-based, they would inevitably be from a personal library of each poet. However, all these extraordinary books will make a good read and a memorable present. It is also an honour for the poets chosen.

all these extraordinary books will make a good read and a memorable present

The Editor’s Poetry Book of the Year

1. Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt, smith|doorstop

Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt

Fun is a rare business in poetry. This collection delivers it in profusion. These poems are supposed to be the telephone banters with poet Stanley Moss. Schmidt weaves impishness in engaging narratives that rise to self-examine and laugh at the poet’s expense. He manages a perfect balance between fun and meticulously crafted poetry. I believe this is a perfect Christmas present for any grandad, rascal or otherwise. The poet’s prosody, quick-fire delivery of lines and rushing style means making sure no one snatches it away from you at a family gathering!


2. The Editor’s International Poetry Book of The Year

EXHAUSTED ON THE CROSS by Najwan Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, foreword by Raúl Zurita, New York Review of Books

Najwan Darwis, Exhausted on the Cross

It is only a second collection of poems by Darwish translated into English. The pip of Palestinian suffering is there but is a heavy stone now. As with any best poetry, it is not about shouting. It keeps us enthralled by the hustle and bustle of intriguing metaphors, suggestive narratives, summoned myths, and unforgettable reality. History and its ironies juxtaposed to our present to create an experience of powerful messages and expressions. I have picked one poem to write about in Confluence to show a poet’s universality here.

Yogesh Patel MBE




Chosen by Ruth Padel               

3. Writing the Camp, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Broken Sleep Books

Writing the Camp, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Broken Sleep Books

Poetry in English is more varied now than ever. I love that Selima Hill’s Men Who Feed Pigeons is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her surreal, surprising lyrics always shed dark illumination on relationships, but the book I nominate is Writing the Camp by Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Born in a Lebanese refugee camp, he conjures heart-stopping meditations from the experience of what is surely the central condition of our time—exile, displacement, asylum-seeking. ‘I gave my fingerprints and left./Every time I think of that moment I feel the need to go back/to that terminal and ask what it meant to touch a/stranger.’ 


Chosen by Imtiaz Dharkar

4. Cath Drake’s The Shaking City, Seren Books

Cath Drake’s The Shaking City, Seren Books

I would like to nominate Cath Drake’s The Shaking City (Seren Books) because of the way it conjures a threatened world and the pleasure it takes in language as an act of grace. The tone may be conversational, sometimes ironic, but its wisdom is delivered with subtle craft and formality. The poems burst with images of tilt and teeter, life at an angle, on the verge of disaster but rich with transformation. ‘The indifferent furniture,’ she says, ‘is as solid as the bodies we must live within, inside my room,/ our room, in a tower block of a city that is shaking.’


Chosen by Pascale Petit

5. Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door, Bloodaxe

Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door, Bloodaxe

Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door (Bloodaxe), was this year’s standout poetry collection for me. It’s a rich and fearless extravaganza of a book, outward-looking, engaging with global crises and news stories with passion and panache. These poems go far beyond reportage – each vignette is transformed into an expansive but compressed bomb. Dealing with subjects as wide-ranging as the shooting at a maternity clinic in Kabul, or the iconic photo of a tigress hugging a tree in Manchuria, the results are packed with fury, outrage, and humour. Sometimes the poem resembles the shape of its subject, so that the form on the page is like an exquisitely fired urn containing an explosion.


Chosen by George Szirtes

6. Ian Duhig‘s New and Selected Poems, Picador

Ian Duhig‘s New and Selected Poems, Picador

I don’t yet have the book but I do have all his others, so maybe I can put in a word for this. Ian Duhig is one of the most humane, musical and erudite of poets, but writes with a street clarity that is rooted as much in song as in speech. The song is subtle and deeply intelligent. He should have won several prizes before. He is, in my opinion, a major poet.




7. Maia Elsners Overrun By Wild Boars, flipped eye

Ian Duhig‘s New and Selected Poems, Picador


I am actually quoted in praise of this book on the cover and think it is a remarkable debut, but one that may be overlooked because it is from a small press. Elsner’s poems are passionate yet intellectually disciplined to a wide variety of forms. There is a central concern with diaspora and tribulation. She knows histories and predicaments and writes with wild control, out of endless curiosity. 


8. Annemarie Austins Shall We Go, Bloodaxe

Ian Duhig‘s New and Selected Poems, Picador

I like Elsner’s book, but for very different reasons, Austin’s book, too, might be overlooked. Whereas Elsner’s voice arises out of a wide international space, Austin is intensely local in the best sense. Not because it is tied to a specific landscape, but because whatever she considers passes through heart, intellect and nerves intimately, yet edgily in touch with their objects. Her voice is quiet, subtle but precise. It’s an unusual voice for the times and all the more valuable for that.


Chosen by Martina Evans

9. Selected Poems by John McAuliffe, The Gallery Press

Selected Poems by John McAuliffe, The Gallery Press

Every McAuliffe poem is an event, a world that is instantly recognisable although we need McAuliffe’s eyes and ears to open that particular door.  Attuned to every nuance of place, firmly planted in the physical world, the poems evoke the tricky passage of time and the instability of place in a changing world. His dexterous sleight of hand– conjuring the fragility of a tent, a household, a bridge— is such a joyous feat, a fresh look, ultimately a celebration of life as a dangerous but exhilarating tight-rope walk.


Chosen by Christopher Reid

10. Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, World Poetry Books (1924-2006)

Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know, World Poetry Books

I heartily recommend Everything I Don’t Know, a selection of poems by Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006), translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer and published by World Poetry Books. The translations make you wonder why a poet so nimble, lucid and perception-changing is not already regarded as a master by English readers of foreign poetry. Every time I open the book I feel it as a challenge to my own performance as a writer: ‘Think more radically! Write more sharply! Be better!’ What more could one ask?


Chosen by Fiona Sampson

11. Ahren WarnerThe Sea is Spread and Cleaved and Furled, Prototype

Ahren WarnerThe Sea is Spread and Cleaved and Furled, Prototype

The brilliant  Ahren Warner’s The Sea is Spread and Cleaved and Furled is a verse sequence with photographs and a short film. Warner’s fiercely intelligent earlier collections often seemed ‘furled’ against the forces of idiocy or blandness. Now he reports on a wildly amoral odyssey through the club scene of South-East Europe and beyond. Decadent but full of self-disclosure, his newly-expansive writing is at once sexy, intellectual and self-aware. ‘She’s not here, i say. i know, i say, but the tears streaking my face are real, i say //and so is the way my neurons are shaking with something i have, in the past, called, love.’ A messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman, this could be the anthem of a generation.


Chosen by Cyril Dabydeen

12. Anita Nahal, What’s Wrong With Us Kali Women?, Kelsay Books, USA.

Anita Nahal, What’s Wrong With Us Kali Women?, Kelsay Books, USA.

Prose-poems by Indian-American poet, Anita Nahal: her third volume with focus on an intimate account of a first-generation, Indian immigrant single mother traversing between cultures and continents. For her, the goddess Kali encapsulates strength and ambition seen through four female figures celebrating their empowerment. The rhythms of prose poems are with their own orthodoxy—Nahal’s forte–without her sounding too preachy or didactic. She writes: I want to feel special when I lay down, unforgettable/So, I chose to be me. A woman. Earthy and sensual. New women seeking transcendence of or beyond the Kaliyug, and forging their own destinies.


Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.

Poet of Honour: Ruth Padel

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


I remember-not a long ago-Ruth lost her mother. Her heartbreak was felt by many of us as friends. So, her collection Emerald was timely. In the eighties, I managed high-end opticians in Wigmore Street at the corner of Wimpole Street, not far from where Ruth was born in the attic of her great-aunt’s house. Hence to me, in a way, her aura was always around the corner! I have also come to know her through Nehru Centre and friends. Therefore, to present her as our Poet of Honour for this Christmas is an exceptional opportunity for me. To be in the company of Imtiaz Dharker last Christmas made our festive outing exquisite. This year, I hope you will equally enjoy Ruth’s presence with us.

Ruth is one of seventy-two great-great-grandchildren of Charles Darwin. So, it is no surprise that she is drawn to science. Her experimental collection, The Mara Crossing, offers us the taste of it. If it occasionally feels parched due to hard science in the book, it also discharges gentle spirit and lyrical skips through many such lines as these:

You go because you heard a cuckoo call. You go because
    you’ve met someone, you made a vow, there are no more
    grasshoppers. You go because the cold is coming, spring
    is coming, soldiers are coming: plague, flood, an ice age,
    a new religion, a new idea. You go because the world rotates,
    because the world is changing and you’ve lost the key.

See how it resonates with our current troubled time!

London, UK – March 17, 2021: Ruth Padel, Poet . Ruth Padel renowed for her poetry has played music all her life. Her living room has music stands and an upright piano with music sheets at the ready. Her garden and its flora and fauna bring memories of her love for Greece. British poet Ruth Padel’s new book of poems Beethoven Variations, in which she folds personal reminiscences of her life, steeped in music, with acute reflects on Beethoven’s life and struggles. CREDIT : Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times

All great poets have a deep sense of music and how words assemble in line with that sate of mind. But Ruth’s understanding of it goes deeper. She grew up playing chamber music and singing, and took raga lessons. Singing and playing music of all kinds, especially classical and world music, informs her work deeply.

Ruth has interest in paintings as well and says, “I cannot paint myself but my poetry draws on looking and imagining, painting and drawing. The narrator of Daughters of the Labyrinth is a painter. There is also nature, science and the environment. (A little about my background, including Charles Darwin, here). I am a Trustee for New Networks for Nature, an alliance of scientists, environmentalists and artists who believe the natural world is central to cultural life; and am currently working on a book about elephants to follow my tiger book.” 

Ruth Padel has won the first prize in one of our most coveted awards, the National Poetry Competition. The quality of her work has remained timeless with much enviable consistency. Unfortunately, we lost her as Oxford’s first female Professor of Poetry with only nine days in an appointment. The unanswered question around it remains: would Derek Walcott have survived the post with all the allegations chasing him? Sir Isaiah Berlin would have been quick to point out the higgledy-piggledy nature of purist morality and its proponents!

All Ruth’s engaging journeys, stories and work collectively propose her as no ordinary Poet of Honour. Enjoy her presence at your Christmas table!

Merry Christmas!

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Ruth Padel

HIS MOTHER WARMS HIS FEET ON A BOAT

cute little legs of anonymous kid sleeping under blanket in bed
Photo by Tatiana Syrikova on Pexels.com


 ‘What is marriage but a little joy and then a chain of sorrows?’
                                                      Maria van Beethoven to Cäcelie Fischer

He goes to school dirty. They say his mother must be dead    
call him Spaniard because he is dark    
tease him about his name.  He leaves school

to play the viola
in the briary tangle of an orchestra.
He wears a sea-green coat, a wig, a little sword.
 
At home he writes concertos
pitching the wonders of modulation 
against his father’s blows.

Gliding north with her down the Rhine
on a winter concert tour, their one journey together,
she keeps him warm, holding his feet in her lap.


The Place without a Door  

black wooden door frame
Photo by ramy Kabalan on Pexels.com

Listen. There are dragons under cities
and monsters in white spaces on sea maps.
Sangatte is Gap-in-Sand. When we were there
we knew it was The Place Without a Door –
that commune on the coast of France
facing water which the English
call English Channel. A border
for which many men, and women, too,
have died. Mark the spot in my brother’s heart
where he built a cardboard shrine
for our wasteland jungle. Check the wall
where someone graffed, Nous voulons de l’air
pour nos enfants.
The cement octagons
where we hid at night to rush the axle
of Spanish lorries. The bridge where my brother
jumped that train into the tunnel.


TIGER DRINKING AT FOREST POOL

tiger s reflection on water
Photo by Robert Stokoe on Pexels.com

Water, moonlight, danger, dream.
     Bronze urn, angled on a tree-root: one
     Slash of light, then gone. A red moon
Seen through clouds, or almost seen.

Treasure found but lost, flirting between
     The worlds of lost and found. An unjust law
     Repealed, a wish come true, a lifelong
Sadness healed. Haven, in the mind, 

To anyone hurt by littleness. A prayer, 
     For the moment, saved; treachery forgiven.
     Flame of the crackle-glaze tangle, amber
Reflected in grey milk-jade. An old song
     Remembered, long debt paid.
     A painting on silk, which may fade.


<strong>Ruth Padel</strong>
Ruth Padel



Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet and novelist, Professor of Poetry at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London She has published twelve acclaimed poetry collections, a range of  non-fiction -from wild tiger conservation to Greek tragedy – and two novels. One set in the jungles of India; and Daughters of the Labyrinth set on the island of Crete, where she has lived on and off all her life. ‘Moving, superbly written: Crete itself becomes one of the main characters in the story.’  (Irish Times, Best Books 2021). ‘Transporting, immersive, historically informative story-telling steeped in the history and folklore of Crete’ (Sunday Times).  Her poems have appeared in New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The White Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest collection, Beethoven Variations, explores a life of creativity and music. ‘Her imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read’ (New York Times). ‘Bold,  breathtaking, spectacular’ (TLS).  In 2020, Ruth updated her 2012 collection on migration in We Are All from Somewhere Else, to include a poem on Syrian refugees to the Greek island of Lesbos, written in collaboration  with Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj. Images and lines from this work were chosen in 2021 as the 101st Object for Radio 4’s History of the World In 100 Objects, with these words which end her poem:
…and their stories our stories
steered by the small
star-light of cell phones

over waves like rings of a tree
rings of the centuries
rocking and spilling
on the windy sea
as if water kept its shape
after the jug has broken
one shining petrified moment

before the shattered pieces fall away.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig

Raymond Antrobus

Keki Daruwalla

Mona Arshi

Christopher Reid


Poet of Honour: Christopher Reid

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


Christopher Reid and Ted Hughes were good friends. Hughes is a profound influence on my poetics. Even Roger Elkin, another authority on Ted Hughes, did not miss it and wrote to me about it when he published my poem, Bottled Ganges, in Envoi. The point being Reid, when asked if Ted Hughes had any influence on him, replied diplomatically. Hughes had his unique voice, and his poetry demanded of readers to invest in his work. Reid’s poems are way different from Hughes’s. These are readily accessible. The words in his poetry invoke a real airy, sensual presence of images. Only in an award-winning Gujarati artist and poet, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, I have faced such trickery by words. I find in Christopher Reid, his words also conjure up Sheikh’s magic and deliver us within ‘live’ corporeal distance of images. This is a unique experience in poetry whereby you feel you are virtually touching or experiencing the object. In your transference to the ambience, you are presented with smell, taste and the sensation of touch. For me, cherries have never been the same ever since reading Reid’s poem in The Red Anthology published by Waterstones! Since my son gifted me that volume and I read Reid’s poem, it has deflected me from the bags of season’s late cherries. Is this also the sort of old age Reid talking about in a poem here? Poetry and words, meticulously chosen and deployed, can endow us with some extraordinary experience! In many aspects, the physical invocation I found in those cherries resonates with The Tomato Vine here.

Besides his poems here, please discover Reid as a maestro in his poem ‘Late’, read by Tom Hiddleston (Loki to you):

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Christopher Reid

The Tomato Vine

red round fruits on tree branch
Photo by Yan Krukov on Pexels.com

The waft, the gasp, a tomato vine releases
each time a fruit is plucked –
in spiciness, akin to the greeting (Hey!)
brushed geranium leaves send up –
brings to my mind the more intricate mind
of George Herbert, who wrote:
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
                    Finde their acquaintance there.

He had his God, his Church, his herbal lore.
May I, who have none of these,
wish him one thing more:
a tomato vine, new from the Americas.

Let his fingers, putting aside prayer,
enquire along its ramifying green instead,
and let his nose be gratified to find
occasional hidden pungent
detonations of red.


Goats and Ducks  

Man withdraws and Nature enters:
goats and ducks in our town centres
show the way that things might tend
should this quiet time never end.
Following initial urges
to nibble hedges and trim verges,
goats and ducks, firmly in charge,
would then invite wild life at large –
roe deer, fieldmice, eagles, otters –
to join their band of urban squatters
and help to tidy up the mess
we left them in our hopelessness.
A thorough civic revolution
could be both their and our solution.
With this in mind, I wish good luck
to Brother Goat and Sister Duck!


Folk Wisdom

photo of an old man beside lamp
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Older and older
         is a tall order.

A widow’s lot
        is to be forgotten.

Old friends fewer,
       new ones unsure.

Once, letters from abroad,
       now the odd Christmas card.

Pains are sharper
       and hold faster.

Hearing gets harder,
       TV louder.

Tottery steps
      mean a taxi to the shops.

Days are briefer
      as a body grows sleepier.

A son phones, 
     then leaves you more alone.

Yet too soon cometh 
     Doctor Death.


<strong>Christopher Reid</strong>
Christopher Reid



Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949. In a career of intermittent employment, he worked for a number of years in publishing, as poetry editor at Faber and Faber, and later, more briefly, as Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He has written and published more than a dozen books of poems, many for adults, a few for children. His most recent volumes have been Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs (Faber, 2018), a canine riposte to T. S. Eliot’s Practical Cats; The Late Sun (2020), a poetry collection; and Poems of London (2021), an anthology in Everyman’s Pocket Poets series. Having edited Letters of Ted Hughes (2007), he is currently at work on an edition of Seamus Heaney’s correspondence.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig

Raymond Antrobus

Mona Arshi


Poet of Honour: Mona Arshi

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


As defined by the Forward Prize winner poet Mona Arshi, a ‘rupture of empathy’ is amplified around us. As a human rights lawyer, she often observes it at a touching distance; yet keeps nurturing life, but in the end, the lilies have to be sadly left to be ‘beauty-drained’. In our chameleon world, the disintegrating expressions have also left the language to undergo its fragmentation; sometimes, when we speak, it wants no responsibility. The darkness envelops us. But a poet in Arshi is still an optimist. She is here to remind us this darkness also allows us to notice light! Such light breaks through in her last collection of poems, Dear Big Gods. She names this compartmentalized light as ‘fridge-light’. The uncertainties are not the only obstacles. We are, as she says, scared, and therefore are ‘invoking gods’. The darkness also shadows the tone in the Ghazal below. To confirm her well-deserved but rightfully earned Regal status in the poetry nation, Mona Arshi keeps the best distance possible from what she does not enjoy, ‘the flattening of language’. To fight this ‘flatness’, as a poet, she puts creases in the velvet of poetry for us to feel the rhythmic folds of lyricism. After all, it is not a business of poetry to offer a flattening of a language! Not even of any memorable prose. Just explore the etymology of the word prosody applied to even poetry. Arshi’s poems also pace with grace and rhythm we have seen in the best poets featured in this series of honour for extraordinary poets of our generation. She takes a seat here with poets whose poetic diction brings us utter joy. So, here is one of the rare British roses of poetry…

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Mona Arshi

The Lilies

arm love woman art
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

The lilies were sick.
I was new and wifely,
a first tiny garden and
my favourite flower right
by the back door.
They had been planted
in raised beds, all
self-conscious in
their outsized whiteness.
For weeks they seemed 
fine, but then I noticed
a kind of injury, perforations
on the petals and a black
sticky gob-
        the fly’s excrement.
I cleaned them up as best I could
but the blight returned.
In the dark with the kitchen lit
they must have peered in,
their occultish and hurting faces
pressed against the glass.
They were hard to love back,
         these flowers.
I gave them nothing else,
spared them my gaze.
Those poor dazed heads.
I suppose I could have
pulled up their sick stems
or poisoned them from the bottle.
But I let them live on
         beauty-drained
in their altar beds.


Ghazal: Darkness  

anonymous person with burning candle
Photo by Rahul Pandit on Pexels.com

Around the base of the trees amongst the broad oaks,
     I leave my daughters to ripen in the darkness.

Beneath the cunning soil’s breath, sweet white snowdrops-
     their strewn hearts are glowing in the darkness.

The soil thanks us; we roll up our cuffs,
      fill our pocket mouths defenceless in the darkness.

A gentle murmured refrain like old rain,
       snowflakes again we answer to the darkness.

I’ve seen those girls foraging for wild mushrooms,
       the rim around their retinas turning in the darkness.

We plant cloves-tiny armless gods into the loam,
         poke them deeper into the uncertainty of darkness.

My girls are distracted and starved of light,
        which is normal, which is essence of girl-darkness.

I slip outside and light a candle, cauterize a bud,
       Shabash I call to my girls, my praise in the darkness.


Delivery Room

dental check up
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Having you nearly killed me. The problem
with active veins is that I bruise like a peach.
My womb is shaking. I croak out some intensifiers
very   absolutely   utterly   totally   like
I am ready to push now. The doctor asks:
‘Do you prefer the geometric or lyrical approach-
I am open to ideas?’ ‘Neither’ I say. His paisley tie
swings like a pendulum over my belly- something
floats into my memory. When pain strikes it is lilac
against the colour of the walls, which are the colour
of Nice biscuits. In the milk of my mind I draw
a diagonal line and a perfect horizon –
‘Have you ever ridden a penny farthing?’
‘Is that important? Will I still get the morphine?’
‘You are presenting very very posterior,’ I hear the rest
of his team concur. One of them doses out the syringe,
the other one is crushing sugared almonds in her teeth.


<strong>Mona Arshi</strong>
Mona Arshi



Mona Arshi was born in West London to Punjabi parents. She worked as a Human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Gods was published in April 2019 (both books published by  Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). Her poems and interviews have been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Times of India as well as on the London Underground. She has judged both the Forward Prize and The TS Eliot prizes for poetry. She has recently been appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool. Mona is currently poet in resident at the RSPB in Cley Marshes, Norfolk. Her debut novel ‘Somebody Loves You’  is due to be published in 2021 by And Other Stories.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig

Raymond Antrobus


Poet of Honour: Keki Daruwalla

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


You cannot read post-colonial Indian poetry by disregarding Daruwalla.

The recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award (1984) and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1987) for Asia, Daruwalla is at his best with his poems engaging with nature. Poet and critic Arundhathi Subramaniam reiterates this in a foreword to a volume of his collected poems: “I decided to allow the throb of the natural world, rich and instinct with life, to lead me through this diverse compilation of fifteen years of (Daruwalla’s) poetry. That meant following the birds. It meant listening for the distant strains of birdcall, tracking changing patterns of migration, and waiting for a magical sighting of a heron’s underbelly or a flash of hawk plumage. As a readerly strategy, it proved rewarding.” The birds are often the birds of prey, observing from the aerial view of history and current affairs, broody landscapes or the social and political disruptions, violent or full of struggles. They scoop Babylons and Naishapur, Luxor and Jerusalem, CIA and MI6, Khayyam and Akhmatova, and more, with rafts and everything in between. However, his career in the Indian Police Service in 1958 has made him confront violence. A selection of his poems is politically vocal. As a man of achievement, he can withstand the adverse political wrath, so, recently, he dared return his Sahitya Akademi Award in protest and highlight the purge on intellectual and artistic freedom. We have included an extra poem at the end to capture the timbre to discover here a different and “chatty” Daruwalla, standing away from the musical disposition and the orderly lyric of the natural world he observes and finds himself in it watched. His collection of poems lets us into distinct departures through a transformation of language and poetics, almost at times, to contrasting tenors from different Daruwallas. It will be wrong to judge this poet with an extensive repertoire with any tunnel vision of poetry.

The change is the only constancy in life; hence, we begin with a poem tuning into a knock on the door from the wind!

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Keki Daruwalla

The knock

big green tree near old building
Photo by Maria Orlova on Pexels.com

The wind knocks at your door
      and you let it in
Dry leaves scrape your door
      and you let them in.
If you were to ruminate
(if you ever had time
      for rumination, that is)
you’d feel for a fly-by moment
that a particular knock you heard
on the far edge of awareness
  was mine.

On the other hand you may never have heard
       a shadow’s tenuous leaf-tap, muffled tap.
It was a harmless knock, I can tell you
–perhaps to meet and tear apart a solecism
or share a perfect iamb I had prised out
       of some crumbling book

But you were another island

The window and skylight of your airy house
        may have opened to a gust of rain,
to gnat and insect, even a firefly pulsing
 low on battery.
But you were so much in love with light
        you couldn’t hear a shadow knock
        you wouldn’t let a shadow in.


Greek Vases

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

On their red-and-black vases and their amphorae
the equatorial bulge of their amphorae
are spearmen setting out, one of them
about to climb onto a one-horse chariot.
When soldiers move one knows their travel plans–
long sapping marches through scrub and marsh,
and deserts where the oases have fled;
till one windy night they come upon an escarpment
overlooking a plain embered with campfires,
Trojan or Turk or Persian
and know in the pith of their hearts
that the next dawn means enemy horse and steel. 

But we are circling  black vase and amphora
and find the spearmen clad in armour
and their spears etched
on the baked memory of clay-
spears longer than the lines of Homer
or the chronicle of Callisthenes.
Behind them are tearful women-
wives and mothers always in black,
as if already in mourning.

Lament and prophecy:
Trojan women, Andromache and Cassandra,
clamber on to the vase without being there.


Face

art painting
Photo by Emre Can Acer on Pexels.com

he doesn’t know her

and he knows
that actually nobody knows anybody

he doesn’t know where she lives
         the unknown is everywhere
distance and perspective
stretch
           from the unknown
           to the unknowable

he has seen her once
the face hard
as if some resolve had
built a bunker there

he had seen her face once
and the words blue titanium
had, like the thin winter cry
of a himalayan thrush,
          suddenly entered his mind

that grief inhabits her face
          he has sensed
a hard face does not turn soft
but can turn to broken shale

he wants to say
lady with the broken-shale aura
enclose your darkness,
          this dark enclosure is yours
          no one can flail or flounder here
but he cannot say it
he does not say it.


Of Vote Banks

road man people street
Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

all living beings got the ballot
they got the right to vote
snake and earthworm and reptile
wolf and jackal and goat…
jackals asked, with their vulpine howls,
for the wilderness to be extended
while roaches demanded more cities
and drainpipes not to be mended
the monkeys wanted more forests
their list of demands was crass
while the tiger stalking his deer
plugged for savannah grass.

the PM fingering his beard
said it is as I feared
we found ourselves in glutinous soup
the moment that lady appeared.
we must call for a vote-count madam
let us ask what the parties desire
this freedom of speech can’t be given to each
we must douse these fanatic fires.
they questioned their friends in whispers
nobody sounded the gong
as they asked the party of Engels
and the party of Mao ze Dong
and they questioned the Marquis Yechury
and Count and Countess Karat;
these people of vision said in unison
‘yeh hai koi poochne ki baat?’
other parties who were sounded
went into huddle, propounded
‘give us some time, these are issues sublime
we won’t be stampeded or hounded.’
they landscaped the political garden,
I mean they first set the scene
and finally said, “we want the head
of the writer Taslima Nasreen.”

<strong>Keki Daruwalla</strong>
Keki Daruwalla



Keki Daruwalla writes poetry and fiction and lives alone in Delhi after his wife’s death in the year 2000. He has just stopped his Political column in the Sunday Tribune. He did his masters in English in 1958 from Government College Ludhiana and joined the Indian Police Service.

His first poetry volume Under Orion was published fifty years ago in 1970. He has 12 volumes of poetry, the last of which was Naishapur and Babylon (2018 Speaking Tiger). His next poetry volume is with his publishers, Speaking Tiger.
His interest in fiction these days is evidenced in his three novels, For Pepper and Christ (Penguin 2009), Ancestral Affairs(HarperCollins 2013) and Swerving to Solitude (Simon and Schuster 2018). His first novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth fiction prize in 2010. He has written half a dozen collections of short stories and his next volume will show case his unpublished Long Stories : From the Crevices of the Past’. He has also just completed a novella on the burning of the Old Alexandrian Library.

Daruwalla joined the Indian Police Service in 1958 and retired as Chairman JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee ) in 1995. He was also a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister in 1970-71. He was Member National Commission for Minorities 2011-2014. He was a part of the Commonwealth Observers Group for the Zimbabwe Elections in 1980-81. Was a Fellow under the Colombo Plan at Oxford University 1980-81 where he spent a satisfying year at the Indian Institute and the Bodleian Library.

Awards: Sahitya Akademi 1984 (which he returned), The Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his book Landscapes, 1987, Poet Laureate (Literature Live 2017) and Padma Shri (2014).

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig

Raymond Antrobus


Poet of Honour: Raymond Antrobus

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


I love the intensity of drama and a labyrinth of meanings in Ted Hughes. Still, when Raymond Antrobus got up at the Edexcel conference launching their diversity curriculum and pictured Hughes visiting a classroom displaying an insensitive response to deaf students, I comprehended Raymond: deaf at birth and not diagnosed until he was seven, how acute his hurt must have been growing up with the deafness! Most of us take the unison of sound and language as default; refine it as poets. But to be born with their disconnection and struggle to reconstruct their lost bond, afterwards to be one of the most revered poets of our time, is the most challenging journey this poet has taken! No wonder, as he says, his poems are an ‘investigation of missing sounds’. Not to forget that he also investigates meaning; after all, how can any poem ignore that leap! Perhaps Raymond also stuns us with a unique sound he hears of these words. In him, a sense of displacement is not only stemming from his heritage of British mother and Jamaican father, or being an odd one out in a classroom, but also from this dual with language and sounds.

Poetry is not a construct; the best ones are always lively with their lyrical/sound intricacies. Its meaning, its soul and the universe it brings together can anchor the disintegrating forces. The sound of ‘Dat’ in the poem here reminds us of the skin, culture, and the identity for ‘stop and search’ and implores us to enjoy the joy in saying ‘dat’ rather than getting diminished in the ‘person of colour’ games! Strong accents are something I can identify with. Raymond conquers his speech as an award-winning performer. With Ted Hughes (ironically in the context given above) Award, Rathbones Folio Prize, Somerset Maugham Award, and Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, the Year 2019 can be emphatically coined as the Raymond Antrobus year! Unfortunately, as love always wins, we are losing this great British poet to jazz in New Orleans. So, just as he packs up his bags for the RAxit, let us have a great hurrah with him here at Ars Notoria as we celebrate him with Poet of Honour. Thanks to Picador for permission to allow us to reprint these poems.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Raymond Antrobus

And That

photo of assorted food hanging on gray metal railings
Photo by Min An on Pexels.com

After seeing a childhood friend outside a chicken shop in Dalston

Chicken wings / and dat
Boss man / salt in them / and dat

Don’t assault man / give man a nap—
Kin / Big man / no steroid / and dat

Dark times / new street lights / and dat
How’s man? / I’m getting by / and dat

Still / boy dem / harass
Not beefin’ / Not tagged / man / still trapped

Cycle man / pedallin’ / and dat
On road / new pavements / levelled / and dat

Crackney changed / still / stay dwelling / and dat
Paradise moves / but I got to land grab

We E8 / East man / ain’t got to adapt
Our Kingdom / got no land to hand back

Man / chat breeze / chat
Trade winds / and dat

You out ends / got good job / legit / and dat?
Locked off man dem / stay plotting / and dat

Rah, Ray / Flower shorts? / You hipster / in dat
Man gone / Vegan? / No chicken wings / and dat


The Rebellious

people at library sitting down at tables
Photo by Genaro Servín on Pexels.com

hold what they can
in front of a supermarket

or police station
or voting booths. I am

kind to the man
sitting next to me

in C.L.R James Library, even if
his breathing disturbs me.

Can we graciously disagree?
I am tired of people

not knowing the volume
of their power. Who doesn’t

deserve
some silence at night?


The Acceptance

Oshun at Etsy

Dad’s house stands again, four years
after being demolished. I walk in.
He lies in bed, licks his rolling paper,
and when I ask Where have you been?
We buried you.
He says I know,

I know. I lean into his smoke, tell him
I went back to Jamaica. I met your brothers.
Losing you made me need them.
He says
something I don’t hear. What? Moving lips,
no sound. I shake my head. He frowns.

Disappears. I wake in the hotel room,
heart drumming. I get up slowly, the floor
is wet. I wade into the bathroom,
my father standing by the sink, all the taps
running. He laughs and takes

my hand, squeezes, his ring
digs into my flesh. I open my eyes again.
I’m by a river, a shimmering sheet
of green marble. Red ants crawl up
an oak tree’s flaking bark. My hands

are cold mud. I follow the tall grass
by the riverbank, the song, my deaf Orisha
of music, Oshun, in brass bracelets and earrings,
bathes my father in a white dress. I wave. Hey!
She keeps singing. The dress turns the river

gold and there’s my father surfacing.
He holds a white and green drum. I watch him
climb out the water, drip towards Oshun.
They embrace. My father beats his drum.
With shining hands, she signs: Welcome.


<strong>Raymond Antrobus</strong>
Raymond Antrobus



Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He’s a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of ‘The Perseverance’ (UK, Penned In The Margins / US, Tin House) and ‘All The Names Given’ (US, Tin House / UK, Picador) as well as children’s picture book ‘Can Bears Ski?’ (UK, Walker Books, US, Candlewick). He is the 2019 recipient of the Ted Hughes Award as well as the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and became the first poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. His first full-length collection, ‘The Perseverance’ was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and The Forward Prize. He divides his time between London and New Orleans.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi

Ian Duhig


Yogesh Patel: a ride on The Rapids


Yogesh Patel’s new poetry collection.

By Phil Hall


The Rapids is a collection of poetry published by The London Magazine, (Price £9.99)

Daring, sophisticated and playful- Patel’s poetry is a calligraphy of the soul made visible. It is a rare achievement.

Steven O’ Brien, Editor of The London Magazine


Deservedly, Yogesh Patel received an MBE for literature last year, in 2020. He runs Skylark Publications UK and a non-profit Word Massala project and we are honoured that he is currently also the poetry editor of Ars Notoria.

Yogesh has nurtured and encouraged many poets to greatness, in particular poets of the diaspora. Yogesh was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. He has LP records, films, radio, a children’s book, fiction and non-fiction books, and three poetry collections to his credit. The Rapids is his latest collection of poems.

My poems are very unconventional. Writes Yogesh. Madness! As I am. Where the poems are a free form, they do not always scan. But I use a conventional tone. My brain, I suppose, is wired up, all tangled, broken up. Jazz, but in tune! The punctuation left behind, or introduced, or created with spaces, is in a different style. The Rapids are jostling, disorientating, with all the excitement of a Thunder River Rapids Ride!

In The Rapids Yogesh Patel unveils a vigorous new poetic form, which looks set to give writers and readers pleasure for years to come. What doubles the pleasure is the way these poems bring the human and natural words in together on a single, generous breath.

Fiona Sampson, poet
Photo by Gaurang Amin


The Rapid: Cogito, ergo sum

Go for a treasure hunt     in a fragmented poet
Where am I?     “Love cannot live without trust.”
Psyche heartbroken  Find me, I’ll be
disconnections:   images, legends
I am rules          chaos in a pirouette

Thunder River            a torrent-in-kicks




bread food plate dinner
Photo by Anand Raj on Pexels.com




Thali

We came together in a pledge
with an allusion of gravity
you winning most coins
in a wedding-game thali.

Eyes locked, sentences with bindi,
we talked around thali.
The aroma absorbed our pasts
in daal, roti and bhaji.

Thali now spins:
centrifugal forces
at work, words are
coins flying like bullets!


crop faceless woman embracing knees and sitting near window
Photo by Teona Swift on Pexels.com



It’ll be Alright on the Night

A bargain         An offer from COVID
                        2021         half lockdown 
            Buy 2 Get 1         Half Price
        Clotted Brexit         Devon cream?
                         502         A bad gateway

Once the sale ends         Reboot!


The poems take you to places of high tension then turn away to face others as if the world itself were restless and constantly on the move. It is like being engaged in the overheard dialogue with language.

George Szirtes, poet


For me, The Rapids express the life of the poet’s thoughts as they flow between rocky outcrops of words; sometimes along the River Wandle in Morden Park, and sometimes along the river Vaitarani in hell. Yogesh carefully tears apart his poems allowing in the reader’s own world, allowing in water, air, light and thereby creating a roiling forward movement.


A milkman’s round

history doesn’t repeat bottles

at four in the morning as it used to

now I stumble over empties we collected

at the doors we erected as monuments

the change is a clock without keys

 to wind back for                   fresh orders




What are the rules for writing Rapids?

Yogesh Patel, MBE
  1. The poem is a 5-1 sestet of short lines
  2. The maximum line length is accentual tetrameter. If shorter, try to maintain a pattern.
  3. As no exception to the rule, the sixth line must be in tetrameter, accentual or otherwise, separate and must be split equally in the middle as 2-2
  4. The two-stress end phrase helps on its own in extending the allegory being handled
  5. The title increments poem’s meaning. It is not a repeat of the theme.
  6. Along with disrupted connectivity, the suggestiveness through metaphorical, folklore or mythical stories and characters is an important aspect of this form.



Yogesh Patel has received MBE for literature in the Queen’s New Year Honours list 2020. Internationally celebrated, he edits Skylark and runs Skylark Publications UK as well as a non-profit Word Masala project to promote South-Asian diaspora literature. Previously he has received the Freedom of the City of LondonWith LP records, films, radio, children’s book, fiction and non-fiction books, and three poetry collections to his credit, he is a recipient of many awards, including an honour in April 2019 at the New York University as a Poet-of-Honor. Amidst many venues, he has read in the House of Lords and at the National Poetry Library.

If you want to know more about Yogesh Patel and his poetry, you can listen to the essay he wrote recently for Writer’s Mosaic.


Poet of Honour: Ian Duhig

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


Writer Judith Chernaik once said to me, most poetry is melancholy, which is true. Hence we have to treat poets like Ian Duhig as a rare national treasure. Where Wendy Cope can be light-hearted, Ian is far more word-mischievous poet. From his palette comes a great mixture of intellect and humour that is highly inventive, eccentric and witty. Whenever the gloom descends on me, I head to Ian’s FB page with the confidence that I will find enough playfulness to relocate myself with the glass half full of Irish whiskey! I dare you to give it a shot. However, when you remove the cover from his poems, you will also discover him as a serious poet. ‘From The Irish’ makes my point; he raids the game of lexicon with love, educating us about how not to get into trouble with the love of your life! There is a reason he has won the National Poetry Competition twice; his lyricism and craft are masterful and inspiring. Do not miss this poet’s work if you want to enjoy a poker-faced Irish delivery of satires in poetry that has echoes of the late Dave Allen. Ian also is about his charity work for the homeless. Like all poets honoured previously with our rare Poet of Honour citation—yes, this series is not endless—Ian also honours us this month with his presence.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Ian Duhig

From the Irish

According to Dinneen, a Gael unsurpassed
in lexicographical enterprise, the Irish
for moon means the white circle in a slice
of half-boiled potato or turnip. A star
is the mark on the forehead of a beast
and the sun is the bottom of a lake, or well.

Well, if I say to you your face
is like a slice of half-boiled turnip,
your hair is the colour of a lake’s bottom
and at the centre of each of your eyes
is the mark of the beast, it is because
I want to love you properly, according to Dinneen.

From The Bradford Count. Bloodaxe. 1991. ISBN 978-1-85224-138-4


The Names of the Plague

after the Middle English

The blame gamer, the ill-shamer,
the brave-killer, the grave-filler,
the buck-passer, the eye-glasser,
the sight-saver, the night raver,
the faith-shaker, the rule-breaker,
the duff ruler, the bluff fooler,
the world-beater, the word-eater,
the first aider, the worst-paider,
the spit-sailor, the inhaler,
the high fever, the deep griever,
the dry cougher, the hat-doffer,
the cold creeper, the old-reaper,
the youth-wrecker, the truth checker,
the head-cracker, the lost tracker,
the host-racer, the slow tracer,
the job-loser, the lost boozer,
the cramped-homer, the spread coma,
the room slayer, the doomsayer,
the sick-tricker, the nit-picker,
the mad chatter, the foil-hatter,
the mask-hater, the nurse-baiter,
the flock fleecer, the palm greaser,
the deal-lander, the back-hander
the wrong richer, the song hitcher,
the rhyme rider, the time bider.

(Its chief name is Legion.)

From ‘New and Selected’ via ‘From Irish Fever to Chinese Flu: The Racialization of Epidemics’
(event on YouTube)


Toast

Chinese hosts at feasts once floated bowls of wine
on water mazes to inspire poetic toasts from guests:
I toasted one Chinese New Year in an artist’s maze,
Li Xiadong’s, there to make an exhibition of myself

with a new poem glossing perfection, his hazel text
enclosing a snowy night garden, a mirror hanging
in its centre to expand upon black and white space
where guests drank in the silence and Chinese wine.

So I toasted the maze’s night for ink to pen the day,
its snow for covering the labyrinths of my missteps,
its hazel twigs for weaving hurdles round my head,
its mirror for hosting faces borrowed from the dead.

From ‘New and Selected’ via ‘Sensing Spaces’ at the Royal Academy


<strong>Ian Duhig</strong>
Ian Duhig



Ian Duhig became a full-time writer after working with homeless people for fifteen years. He has published since then, among other things, seven books of poetry, most recently ‘The Blind Roadmaker’ (Picador 2016), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward Prizes. A former Royal Literary Fund Fellow, he was Trinity College Dublin’s International Writer Fellow in 2003. He works with musicians, artists, film makers and socially excluded groups. Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted four times for the TS Eliot Prize. His New and Selected Poems will be published by Picador in December 2021. He is a Cholmondeley Award recipient and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey

Moniza Alvi


Poet of Honour: Moniza Alvi

Poet of Honour, an accolade by Ars Notoria and Word Masala Foundation, celebrates our best contemporary poets we should have read by now. They are iconic and a major inspiration.


One can be unbearably expressive with the implicit statements, but when you are not being Bukowski, a good poet shows us how doubly effective the subtly can be and how it devastates us with a message that can whip up in us reactions more strongly than any megaphone noise ever can. This month, Moniza Alvi brings us such a shattering reality and leaves us asking to redefine the use of the word animal. When I watched the harrowing award-winning series Delhi Crime on Netflix, it reminded me that miles away from the megaphone feminism the artists can create a better narrative than the political correctness that springs up from any tribal uprising! I hasten to add that Moniza’s poems here may be dealing with one issue, the poet’s palette is wide-ranging. A key to notice is her craft: very precise and incisive with each word weighing in with its presence. Just look at the poem Candle. With candle, caves, stalagmites and stalactites, does it need to say more? That such mastery appears throughout her collected oeuvre is what makes Moniza our extraordinary poet. I must thank Neil Astley and Bloodaxe once again for their kindness and permissions as with some of our previous Poets of Honour, Imtiaz Dharker, Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Tishani Doshi.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Poems by Moniza Alvi

Mermaid

after the painting ‘When We Talk About Rape’ by Tabitha Vevers

About human love,
                            she knew nothing.

I’ll show you he promised.
But first you need legs.

And he held up
                          a knife    

with the sharpest of tips
to the ripeness of her emerald tail.

She danced an involuntary dance
captive
             twitching with fear.

Swiftly
             he slit

down the muscular length
exposing the bone in its red canal.

She played dead on the rock

             dead by the blue lagoon
             dead to the ends of her divided tail.

He fell on her, sunk himself deep
into the apex.

Then he fled
                     on his human legs.

Human love cried the sea,
the sea in her head.               


Candle

The fresh wound is a candle
Lighting steps down into the caves.

Among stalagmites and stalactites
The old wound crouches low.


The Sleeping Wound

Hush, do not waken
The sleeping wound.

It lies on its crimson pillow,
red against red.

The long wound in the afternoon.
The long wound in the evening.

Centuries later,
no longer red,

it opens its eyes
at the most tentative kiss.


Happiness

Halfway down the stairs
I hugged it to my chest.

It was the size of a small
collection of laundry,

The shape of the bundle
Dick Wittington carried

on a stick at his back,
or the tiny parcel of spices

(the woody ones)
My mother would lower

for the duration
into a pot of steaming pullao rice.

For the duration.
that would be a fine thing.


Moniza Alvi
Moniza Alvi



Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hertfordshire. She worked for many years as a schoolteacher in a London comprehensive school. Moniza has published nine poetry collections including The Country at My Shoulder (OUP, 1993) which was shortlisted for T.S. Eliot and the Whitbread poetry prizes, and chosen for the New Generation Poets promotion.  Europa (Bloodaxe, 2008) and At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe, 2013) were both Poetry Book Society Choices and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.  She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002.  Homesick for the Earth, her versions of the French-Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. A new collection Fairoz will appear in spring 2022.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans

Sinéad Morrissey


Poet of Honour: Sinéad Morrissey

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.


I am not Stanley Moss as in Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt, a collection just published by Smith|Doorstop, but I enjoy a fair number of email exchanges with Schmidt. So, when he nominated Sinéad Morrissey for our Poet-of-Honour celebration, I felt honoured by both of them! Morrissey is one of our most revered poets. There is a valid reason behind it. Even as I write this, she has been shortlisted for the 2021 Pigott Poetry Prize. You can see in her biog the list of many awards her work enjoys. Having taken a journey through various cultures, I suppose it comes naturally to her not only to capture a sweeping range of images, sculptures, monuments, and paintings, but to be touched by political, cultural and geographical aspects as well. Be that as shown in a poem on the Greek monetary crisis or as in The State of the Prison, depicting atypical forms or modes of imprisonments (sounding Kafkaesque at times). The family facets are also at the heart of much of her work; as in the grandfather’s image of punting on the horses to ghosts playing with the child.

Quite like Parallax, a name of her award-winning collection, Morrissey tries to see her ambience and the themes from a different point of reference to reveal poetry. The digging narrative to view this angle builds a trench for us to view and not disturb the habitat of life getting on with its business! I am in absolute awe; I hope you will be too!

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Three Poems by Sinéad Morrissey

Inside the Wizard

lightning and tornado hitting village
Photo by Ralph W. lambrecht on Pexels.com

Because it was. Hunger abroad, jabbing its smoke-funnel thumbs
down precisely on neighbouring farms, the exfoliated disc
of the land disarmed—so flat to the horizon in every direction
it makes a circle wherever you stand. Dust onto dust:
the grass destroyed, the cattle desiccated, the grace-
and-napkin clamour of breakfast devoured by the wind.
The government called in tornado-belt weather, but we knew better.

For our house to be lifted whole, for our roof to be lifted whole,
and every other building smashed to kindling? For every word
you had for what this meant we had a better word.
While Toto barked and ran from window to window, the thin pigs
stranded below stared up at the vanishing architrave
of all they knew and we stared down, as from a dirigible,
at the split earth’s gritty distress, its rabid unanchoring—

He will burn up the chaff in unquenchable fire.
And how like us they were, the Saints, in their burnished
plaits and socks, standing in shining rows. If you’ve seen
their faces once, as we have, you become unfrightenable.
The colours of Heaven were what we carried back,
so bright and adamantine in our daily work we kept them
as a talisman or spell—like wishing trees or movies, only real.

Carcanet Press, 2016


House Rules

silhouette photo of person holding door knob
Photo by George Becker on Pexels.com

1.

Come in. Welcome.
Dave’s told us everything.

2.

Drop your phone in the basket—
we can take care of it.

Good.

We keep our reception clear for God.

3.

This is the kitchen. Whoever does the cooking
also washes up. We call it Being Mother.
The men eat first so we serve them first.

They’re away right now at target practice.

4.

And this is the Shriving Room.
Just whatever you feel the need to share.
We listen silently.

We give to Dave
Dave gives to God
so through Dave we give to God
Dave-God is the God in us
and God-in-Us is God for Dave—

We never run out.

From each according—
Don’t worry. We’ll teach you.

6.

There’s no traffic of course.
The crows make a racket
but you soon get used to it.

We borrow each other’s clothes on Sundays—
Dave picks who wears
whose shoes.

7.

Here’s where we Sister-Sleep.
I know. The relief.
I felt it too.
Years ago.

8.

Dave says the heart is a needle;
if we render our lives
as a whetstone
we can pierce anything.

9.

He’ll be back soon.

I wish I could go through my own Withholding
all over again.

10.

Like all of us
you’ve travelled such a long way round
to be found at last.

Carcanet Press, 2016


A Tourniquet for Emily Davison

woman wrapped in tape
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

A harridan-Houdini, cages—and not just the ribcage of that final horse
you hailed like a tram on Tattenham Corner—they the reynes
of his brydel henten—but corsets, railings, handcuffs, cubby holes,
heat shafts inside the Houses of Parliament, taunted you all your life,
faire Emelye, like the Keep Out signs on the King’s Estate
or the clang of your yellowing cell in Strangeways
each time they frogmarched you back. What manner of woman were you?
Appalled editorials harrumphed in a fug of pipe fumes;
a child on a poster in a nacreous cardigan wept stunted tears of neglect—
Mummy’s a Suffragette!—outside Marylebone Station.

At first the slippery trick of fasting set you free, by which the bones
assert their own supremacy: your sentences axed repeatedly
just by turning the face of Kafka’s Hunger Artist or a starveling Christ
before Pentecost towards your captors. Queasiness in Whitehall;
a burn like caustic soda through the notion of gentleman.
But it didn’t take long for the State to stiffen its spine, roll up its sleeves
and conjure a bag of tricks of its own: a tube, a buckle, a funnel, a gag,
your own body breathing on its slab, forced to outfox you.
You staggered from each feeding session dishevelled and drenched,
a veteran of rough seas and shipwrecks.

It must have been dizzying, the tableau vivant of each arrest so grimly
asymmetrical: whatever cry for justice launched towards man and heaven,
whatever momentary, public flurry—exploding glass, fire in a pillar box—
collapsed suddenly to a woman with her hair undone, pale as a peony,
pinned between policemen. Horses, compacted torsos
and high-stepping hooves, flanked you here also:
their sinews the sinews of the immutable world, viciously reasserted.
As rain continued to fall on the reasonable cobblestones
you were escorted away from the theatre of the street like an apostate
over and over again, in violet weathers.

Carcanet Press, 2016


Sinéad Morrissey
Sinéad Morrissey


Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She is the author of six poetry collections and has won many awards for her work, including First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, the Irish Times Poetry Prize (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize (2013). Her most recent collection, On Balance, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection (2017) and the European Poet of Freedom Award (2020). A Selected Poems, Found Architecture, was published by Carcanet last year. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-2014), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi

Martina Evans


Poet of Honour: Martina Evans

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.


Youngest of ten children, if you ever encounter Martina Evans, loquacious friendship is what you will find in her. Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men is her latest collection of poems. Almost a hundred years later, in this exceptional flip side of the fight recounted, the poet makes us relive the period of the men stifled by the Irish Conflict around 1919. Instead of writing with lopsided sentimental and political views, she focuses on capturing an exquisite depository of the characters of the men involved in that conflict. These men are from the stories told by her mother and the others but distilled through the eyes of women in her narrative, to be precise through Kitty Donovan’s and Babe Cronin’s eyes. You are put on the spot to judge yourself a war against fragmentary humanity. Flawed and full of grit are the men of the war she is talking about, so one must not get deceived by the provoking title giving the impression of a feminist agenda or #MeToo tones! The men here are caught in the fighting and dismantled in their wanting traits. “As my mother would talk”, she weighs words, not losing their Irish lyricism—and occasional humour. Martina crafts her poems, leaving us to experience the narrative as a humane emotional roller-coaster cast in her “Irish vernacular”. 

I am thrilled that through her other poems selected here we can celebrate Martina Evans as our Poet of Honour. She brings us her mother’s reigning – but delightful – presence, as well as her own experience as a radiographer recording a kick of a very Irish ‘Oh’ formula (!) that pumps the veins of ‘a mad exhibitionist English‘ Gazebo ‘on an English village green’.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Three Poems by Martina Evans

Gazebo

young ethnic couple resting in old wooden gazebo on daytime
Photo by Hong SON on Pexels.com

Gazebo was the word my mother
used to describe a mad exhibitionist
or a queer hawk. For example,
so-and-so was going around like a
right gazebo. Naturally I imagined
a gazebo had legs and travelled so
I was surprised to see my first one
on an English village green, going
nowhere, the wedding couple
toasting each other under its rippling
blue and white canopy as cricket bats
smacked slowly in the heat. My mother
grew up near landed gentry and
the gazebos hidden in their walled gardens
must have entered her language
like escaped seeds,
growing into wild tramps
that straggled along the Rathkeale road,
on strange, overblown feet.

The Windows of Graceland, Martina Evans, Carcanet Press, 2016


Facing the Public

joyful adult daughter greeting happy surprised senior mother in garden
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

My mother never asked like a normal person, it was
I’m asking you for the last time, I’m imploring you
not to go up that road again late for Mass.

She never had slight trouble sleeping, it was
Never, never, never for one moment did I get a wink,
as long as my head lay upon that pillow.

She never grumbled, because No one likes a grumbler,
I never grumble but the pain I have in my two knees this night
there isn’t a person alive who would stand for it.

She didn’t just have an operation; she died in the Mercy Hospital
and came back to life only when Father Twohig beckoned
from the foot of her blood-drenched bed.

She didn’t just own a shop and a pub, she told bemused waitresses
that she was running a business in the country, urgently
when she insisted that we were served first.

She didn’t do the Stations of the Cross
she sorrowed the length and breadth of the church.
And yet, she could chalk up a picture in a handful of words

conjure a person in a mouthful of speech; she took off her customers
to a T, captivating us all in the kitchen,
drawing a bigger audience than she bargained for.

How often we became aware of that silent listener
when he betrayed himself with a creak, a sneeze or a cough.
How long had he been standing, waiting in the shop?

We looked at each other with haunted faces,
and I, being the youngest, got the job of serving him
his jar of Old Time Irish, his quarter pound of ham,

writing his messages into The Book, red-faced and dumb
before his replete and amused look.
Meanwhile, inside, my mother held a tea towel to her brow.

Never, never, never would she be able, as long as she lived,
even if she got Ireland free in the morning,
no, no, no she would never be able to face the public again.

The Windows of Graceland, Martina Evans, Carcanet Press, 2016


Clinical Indications

photo of an ob gyn looking in the monitor
Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

Oh was shorthand for the chemical equation
C2H5Oh – Ethanol meaning alcohol,
a tip-off from the doctor,
a coded message
to say drink was involved/ the patient was drunk.
The radiographer faraway
in a deserted X-ray department at night
had to watch out for the obstreperous.
It might have been shorthand for Irish
but how could they scare me when
I only had to lay my Cork accent
like a wand on their ears?
Once I puzzled over
a request form for a chest X-ray
that gave one word – Irish –
in the Clinical Indications box.
Was it a joke? Or working backwards,
shorthand for the drink or drunk
or look out
for the telltale fractures of the third metacarpal
from frustrated Paddies punching walls
for the bi-lateral healed rib fractures
of the older labouring immigrants
who got so plastered they fell down,
broke, healed and carried on,
the stigmata inside the coats
of their skin like the rays from
a sacred heart? Or did it mean
what I never understood?
That night, the young doctor
with the black moustache
too close to me at 2 a.m.,
his breath in my ear, whispering –
Something has to be done about the Irish.
They’re spreading TB, spitting it
on the floors in Kilburn.
I’m scanning another man’s head
so I can’t move away from
the smell of his Wotsits.
I look straight ahead while
through the microphone
on the other side of the glass
my voice echoes –
Keep still, you’re doing brilliant –
to Mr MacNamara, yards away
terrified on a moving table.


Martina Evans
Martina Evans


Martina Evans grew up in County Cork and trained in Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. She has won several awards, including the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was an Observer, TLS and Irish Times Book of the Year in 2018. Mountainy Men, a narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and is an Irish Times poetry critic.

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

Cyril Dabydeen

Tishani Doshi


Worth a Royal Mention

Ars Notoria in Royal Society of Literature March news

Inbox

Mar 9, 2021

Dear Phil,

Please note the Royal Society of Literature now sports our Poet of Honour series in their latest newsletter. See below a newsletter forwarded to the members. A link to Ars Notoria is also embedded. This is the recognition and fruit of my labour, of our labour. I hope you rejoice in it!

Yogesh

Poet of Honour: Tishani Doshi

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.


Meet Tishani in a place between her playful disposition and our exigent reality. She puts god in the middle of our chaos, our storming contradictions, our cosmos. As a rare treat, here are three poems from her collection: ‘A God at the Door’ Tishani Doshi is a tempest of talents. With her playfulness, her use of poetic forms and teasing beliefs, she summons up a vast array of images to create a universe in every poem that is never alien but very much anchored in reality. Tishani has also performed with the choreographer Chandralekha who created contemporary work using the traditional forms of Bharatnatyam, kalarippayattu and yoga. Her arresting grace and intense expressiveness in dance transfer well to her writing.

For me, it is a rare pleasure to honour and present Tishani to you. There are few poets of Gujarati heritage who have garnered such international recognition for their writing in English as she has. As you will see in these poems, whether they are about refugees, macroeconomics, or the cosmos, Tishani scoops up the social context and moulds it into poems. This is not a poet in the wilderness; though as a poet she pulls nature into her grasp! ‘It is not always a war between celebration and lament.’ she says with a yogic pause in her poem. But the hiatus, in fact, filled with hope.

A God at the Door is available to order now from Bloodaxe. 22nd April 2021 is the official launch of the book.

-Yogesh Patel MBE


Photo by Carlo Pizzati

Three Poems by Tishani Doshi

Survival

Dear ones who are still alive, I fear we may have overthought
things. It is not always a war between celebration and lament.
Now we know death is circuitous, not just a matter of hiding
in the dark, or under a bed, not even a slingshot for our loved
ones to carry, it changes nothing. Ask me to build a wall
and I will build it straight. When the end came, were you
watching TV or picnicking in a field with friends? Was the tablecloth
white, did you stay silent or fight? I hope by now you’ve given up
the fur coat, the frequent flyer miles. In the hours of waiting,
I heard a legend about a woman who was carried off by winds,
a love ballet between her and the gods, which involved only minor
mutilations. How I long to be a legend. To stand at the dock
and stare at this or that creature who survived. Examine
its nest, marvel at a tusk that can rake the sea floor for food.
Hope is a noose around my neck. I have traded in my rollerblades
for a quill. Here is the boat, the journey, the camp. If we want
to arrive we must push someone off the side. It is impossible
to feel benign. How many refugees does it take to build
a mansion? I ask again, shall we wait or run?
Here is winter, the dense pack ice. Touch it. It is a reminder
of our devastation. A kind of worship, an incantation.


Photo by Vifick Bolang

Macroeconomics

One man sits on another if he can.
One man’s heart beats stronger. One man goes
into the mines for another man to sparkle.
One man dies so the family living at the top of the hill
can eat sandwiches on the lawn. One man’s piggy bank
gets a bailout. One man tips over a stranger’s vegetable cart.
One man stays home and plays tombola till all this blows over.
One man hits the road like a pilgrim to Shambala, child
on shoulders. One man asks who’s going to go out and buy
the milk and eggs? One man’s home is across the horizon.
One man decides to walk there even though it will take days
and nights on tarmac with little food and water.
One man is stopped for loitering and made to do squats
for penance. One man reports fish are leaping
out of the sea and sucking greedily from the air.
One man eats his ration card. One man notices how starlings
have taken to the skies like a toothache,
a low continuous hunger, searing across the fields.
One man loads his gun. One man’s in charge of the seesaw.
One man wants to redistribute the plums. One man knows
there’s no such thing as a free lunch. One man finally sees
the crevasse. One man gives his blanket to the man
sitting in the crevasse. One man says there should be a tax
for doing such a thing and takes it back. The ditch widens.


Photo by Carlo Pizzati

Cosmos

Each night I take my boat out to you, asleep under
the oaks. I thought I saw a lotus creep out of your navel,
which means you got my cable. Remember when we were
young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever,
a million light years away. Now we’re in the thick of it.
See how it swallows everything—a jungle leopard feasting
through our bloodline of mongrels. Have you noticed,
lying there as you do in moonlight, how a hurricane viewed
from outer space looks like a wisp of cotton candy?
Or how the seagull nebula resembles a section of rosy
duodenum? Down in the market a man speaks of finding
anger in his left armpit. Another talks of space debris
drifting into the River Lethe. No one can tell me
why we paint demons on our houses, except it has
to do with entries and exits. The monsters are never
far away. I want to believe the earth is a single breathing
organism. I want to keep going with this bronze body
of mine, turning and turning the gears. You left no note,
so I must assume you woke in the middle of a dream
and took shelter in the forest. Maybe you’re already
in the beauty of that other world, growing planetary rings
and gardens of foxglove. You know this skin is a thin
partition, citrus and bergamot sealed in. It’s always
ourselves we’re most afraid of. Take this vellum
and pin it to your bodice. Let it say we were here.


T<strong>ishani Doshi</strong>
Tishani Doshi



Tishani Doshi is an award-winning writer and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, India, in 1975, she received a masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University, and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001, where a chance encounter with the choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. She has published seven books of fiction and poetry, the most recent of which are Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Poetry Award and a Firecracker Award, and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Tata Best Fiction Award, and a New York Times Bestsellers Editor’s Choice. She has interviewed over a hundred writers about the craft of writing, publishes essays in The Hindu, Granta, The National, The New York Times, The Guardian, Lithub and Corriere della Sera. She is a visiting professor of creative writing at New York University Abu Dhabi, and otherwise, lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu, India. A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books), her fourth collection of poems, is forthcoming in spring 2021.

(Photo by Vifick Bolang)

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

Cyril Dabydeen


Poet of Honour: Cyril Dabydeen

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

goat on rough walkway near unrecognizable tailor in old building
Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Pexels.com

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.

<strong>Cyril Dabydeen</strong>
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

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: 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.

<strong>Vidyan</strong> <strong>Ravinthiran</strong>
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.

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: 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.

credit: Ayesha Dharker

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

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

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: 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

Pascale Petit
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

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.

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


Poet of Honour: 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

Vijay Seshadri

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

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.

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

George Szirtes

Steven O’Brien

Nick Makoha

Fiona Sampson

Mimi Khalvati


Poet of Honour: Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati
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

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.

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