Four Poems by John Comninos

his was the dance
 
crow had danced in youth
in praise to god, 
for dance was his love
and love the body’s 
hallelu—
without chagrin
or prevarication, 
this was joy
joy until god fled 
 
and steps
and flight 
movement
 
he had not moved since
his soul became still as god’s voice
 
sleep was the exception
untainted by the lost world
 
within faint confine
he dreamed
and he dreamed he awoke
and he dreamed he danced
again and god
too

love and love
 
he woke with
disappointment;
upon waking, his dreams
were simply moments
interpolations
and god
the God of the dance
an understudy


it was as if christ
 
it was as if christ,
the median, was in his inner sight
and he could not yet see the end; 
 
he peered towards the core 
with fear, for in this place 
was the surrogacy of hope
 
like some ancient artifact that held him; 
he thought about the grail, 
its containment, and he felt lost
 
without it, lost with it—wondered 
if he was moving,
travelling—between fragments,
 
less of his past
or the divisory elements of the now
and while he wondered

it was as if Christ
became an augment to heart, Christ—
soothing, sonorous, solist

it was as if Christ, until now,
had waited to speak these words,
as if Christ had bent

into his hollow frame
to promise the very grail,
how blood and flesh meet

in this holy surprise


bosom
 
he knew his soul
he knew its stem
 
its voice, its creed
its stupefaction
 
he had known it
when he waited
 
for god in a church
 
~
 
had observed
the pure enchantment
of its ancient quiver
 
when he had looked at
jesus and his perfumed
feet and a woman
washing his body
 
~
 
since then his soul
had never denied him
 
and now in the reach
of an uneven love
 
he knew
once more 
 
the call
of its passions
 
pure as breath 
upon the new day
 
in a new prayer, he bent
towards this 
 
for this was his soul
and he knew 
it


interment

we laid them at rest
walked the short walk
from star to grave
bequeathed them
towards their own dust

onlookers seemed drawn
in grimaces of grief

they watched the deaths
as distant deities
the tragicomedy,

the priests led the way
and then the wood
and then the others
and then the descent
always down always


we filled the graves
with sand and rock
the dirt, itself, 
alien, though familiar 
as children, we tasted
the ground

the spade in my hand
was comforting
a comfort to touch 
and shovel and dig
propel the past

finally we lay
the elements down
patted the ground
my hand pressed there

remains


John Rueal Comninos is a Gestalt Psychotherapist and Play Therapist as well as a Pastoral Psychologist. He initially studied theology (LIC.Th) and became a Presbyterian Minister and later studied Pastoral Psychology at Stellenbosch University (M.Th.) and Gestalt Therapy at UNISA and has extensive experience in trauma, he lectured broadly in Psychology at Huguenot College and lectured and supervised students in the Masters Programme in Pastoral Psychology at SU and in the Masters programme in Play Therapy at the Play Therapy Centre, Wellington.

CIIIR

by Peter Cowlam

CIIIR

A reining in at the eco-centre. Dials
in reverse for the lost trials of inspection.
Ends but a stunted survey,
fixated on crowds and venues. They are here,
young obsessives of ‘belonging’, cropped in line,
and blessed by the shades of the dead, each 
    with plans
for a history staggered by restarts. Bets
are made on the fall of dice, down payment
on the strategists of destruction. We ask,
what news, when there’s a fifth apocalyptic 
horseman, bringer of fire, floods, dearth, the crackle
of flames in our trees, earthquakes and migrations.
There is an old prince, there’s a new king reigning.

@petercowlam

Curing the Pig, by Eliza Granville

Episode 10

The Quixotesque misadventures of unreconstructed Marcher Morgan Jones-Jones, who has probably not heard of the suffragettes let alone second- and third-wave feminists.

“Give it a rest, can’t you?” snarled Morgan, his eyes scanning the green for a large stone to dash the creature’s brains in. He didn’t feel right. His stomach hurt. They’d been scuttling between shadows for ever and Loki’s obsessive chant, entirely lactic in nature and pitched somewhere around middle C was curdling his temper. Besides, he was sure they’d passed this mossed-over apology for aresidence at least twenty minutes ago.

Loki came to a standstill. “I can’t. It’s the only thing keeping me going. Caerphilly, Orkney, Caboc, Isle of Mull, Crowdie, Dunlop—”

Morgan ground his teeth. “How much further is it?”

“Dunno. Hey! Hey!” A sharp little elbow jabbed Morgan’s knee. “France! I could go back to France. Back to France, I said. That’s the real land of milk and honey, you know. They’ve got at least one cheese for every single day of your year. Cabécou de Rocamadour, Bleu de causses, Le Fougerus, Crottin de Chavignol, Murol, Vacherin Haut-Doubs – I’m more sophisticated than what you thought, ain’t I? Le Fium’Orbo, Pithiviers au foin, Aisy Cendré, Bougnon, Frinault, Fromage Corse, Nantais – Oh, hang on, I think we turn right at this tree. Or is it left? No, it’s right. Right, I said, right. What’s the matter with you, not knowing your right from your elbow? Tomme de Savoie, Abbaye de Belloc, Livarot, Gris de Lille yes, I’m right. It was definitely left. We’re nearly there. La Taupinière, Figue—”

“Finished?”

“No, of course I haven’t finished. I’m an expert in my field. An expert, I tell you. I can keep going for hours – Mâconnais, Maroilles, Ardi-Gasna, Dauphin – Why do you ask?”

Morgan smiled, having spied a dead branch, half-hidden in the grass, nice and heavy, just the thing. “Because if you don’t stop right now, I’ll fucking do you in.” Loki took him literally, stopped dead, and began to water the shrubbery.

“That’s it, find your own way.”

Morgan dropped the branch. His guide lowered his voice. They continued.

Ossau-iraty-brebis Pyrénées, Cantal, Bûchette d’Anjou, Pavé d’Auge, Péardon, Camembert, Arômes au Gène de Marc, Chaource, Gaperon, Baguette Laonnaise, Banon, Roquefort, Oh Queen of cheeses, Laguiole, Langres, Laruns, Petit-Suisse, Chabichou du poitou, Brie, Mimolette Française, Selles-sur-Cher, Raclette, Brocciu, Tomme de Romans, Valançay, Beaufort, Morbier, Bleu d’Auvergne, Fleur du Maquis, Sancerre—

Morgan sighed.

“You don’t have to walk next to me, listening,” Loki pointed out. “Skip on for a bit. Pont l’Evêque, Tamie, Salers, Comté, Fourme d’Ambert, Bleu de Haut Jurat, Soumaintrain, Pouligny-Saint-Pierre, Reblochon, Vignotte, Rollot, Bleu de Laqueille, Tomme d’Abondance, Neufchâtel, Cîteaux, Rigotte, Pérail, Boulette d’avesnes—–”

“Oh, God.”

“He won’t help you. Not here. Carré de l’Est, Sainte-Maure de Touraine, Chevrotin des Aravis, Coulommiers, Dreux à la feuille, Saint-marcellin – at least I’m not repeating myself – Poivre d’Ane, Epoisses de Bourgogne, Grataron d’Arèches, Olivet Bleu, Olivet Cendré, Palet de Babligny, Picodon de l’Ardèche, Saint-nectaire – Oh, bliss, bliss, bliss—”

Several dozen obscure French cheeses later, Morgan happened upon Rowan and Hermaze and was awarded a brotherly hug.

“Welcome home, brother, such as it is. Glad you managed to escape.”

Hermaze shuddered. “That cathel’th no plathe for a man. It’th full of nymphomaniakth and fanthy boys. Warned you, didn’t we?”

Neither seemed pleased to see his companion. Rowan, in particular, began twitching with antipathy. “What are you hanging around with this little bastard for?”

“Bathtard,” echoed Hermaze. “Thtinkth of pith, too.”

“I needed a guide. Sorry.”

Nökkelost,” sang Loki, with blithe indifference, calling to mind the cheesy delights of Scandinavia, “and Gammelost, Pråstost, Danbo, Samsø, Gjetost, Jarlsberg, Maribo, Herrgårdsost, Våsterbottenost, Hushållsost, Mesost, Esrom, Havarti—”

“Filthy curd addict,” scowled Rowan. “He makes make me sick.”

“Bad enough you coming back where you’re not wanted,” declared Elverin, emerging to shake his dusters, “without bringing Puck to cause even more trouble.”

“Puck – he said his name was Loki, or was it Cupid?”

“Puck,” snapped Rowan. “He’s bloody Puck.”

Hermaze barred the door. “Well, don’t think you’re coming in here, becauth you’re not, you thpying little turncoat runt, you filthy agent of matriarchy.”

Puck smirked. “Juustoleipä, Ilves, Tutunmaa.”

“He’ll have to come in, unfortunately,” muttered Rowan. “We can’t stand out here letting the world and her husband overhear all our business.”

The atmosphere downstairs was subdued. After exchanging stories, a large pot of herb tea was brewed and the entire company sat around peering disconsolately into their mugs.

“Sorry,” Morgan said for the fiftieth time. “I had nowhere else to turn.”

Cuajada,” mumbled the connoisseur formerly known as Loki, “Queso Ibores, Cabrales, Diazabal, Mahon, Castellano, Burgos, Roncal, San Simon, Queso del Tietar, Amrano, Manchego, Mato, Penamellera, Picos de Europa, Queso majorero, Queso de Murcia, Afuega’l Pitu.”

“See how the mighty are fallen,” said Backus with a deep sigh. He glared at the youngsters perched under the window stabbing at their tapestry frames. “Let this be a lesson to you all. See what happens when you put Self first. This ugly thing started out as Eros, a godlet with the divine task of bringing together Twin Souls, and finished up as the Trickster, resorting to pathetic scatological pranks just to get noticed.”

“I’ve decided on Pwwcha now, if you don’t mind. Pwwcha, I said. At least the Welsh still remember me. My name’s changed because I learned how to adapt, to go where I was still believed in. As for history, bug off. I stuck it out longer than you did.”

“He’s nothing but a great big spoiled baby.” Backus’ lip curled. “That’s why he’s so keen on milk products.”

“It’s neoteny, actually,” countered Puck. “And that’s a recognised condition, ain’t it? Halloumi, Caciocavallo, Mascarpone, Asiago, Pressata, Canestrato Pugliese, Mozzarella di Bufala, Crescenza, Fiore sardo, Bra, Raschera, Fontina.”

Backus sniffed. “You think you’re so clever, but all you’re reciting is a catalogue of coagulated rancid body fluids.”

“You can talk, toxin-monger, you can talk. At least I never dabbled in ethanol. No wonder your memory’s gone. No wonder, I say. Nothing wrong with mine though, and I can still remember you in your alter ego. Hey, boys – does the name Dionysus mean anything to you? Dionysis, I said. He invented the hangover. What a gift. Yes, and what about that donkey, Backus? A jenny, wasn’t it? I heard tales…. You don’t want to hear about that, do you? It’s always the same with the converted, ain’t it? Like people preaching clean air immediately they give up smoking.”

“What’s he on about, Sernunnos?” demanded Backus, looking uncomfortable. “This Dionysus, what’s he got to do with me?”

Sernunnos averted his eyes and shook his head. “No good going into all that again. Don’t worry. It’s been programmed out of you. You wouldn’t believe me if I explained. Now, what are we going to do for our Hertha-friend here?”

“Look,” said Morgan, “just tell me how to activate the stone circle and I’ll be on my way.”

“Dionysus, Dionysus,” mumbled Backus. “I’m getting some very nasty flashbacks here, very nasty.”

Puck sniggered. “And so you should. Toma, Ubriaco, Canestrato Pugliese – no, I said that last one already.” He nudged Morgan. “No good you thinking along those lines, squire, you won’t get nowhere near the portal. Nowhere near, I tell you. They’ve put a twenty-eight hour watch on the place. We’re going to have to find another way – and pretty damn quick, too. There’s a house-to-house search scheduled for tonight, immediately after moon-up. It’s top secret. Casciotta di Urbino, Castelmagno, Montasio, Murazzano – I’m not repeating myself, am I?”

“I told you he was a spy,” snarled Rowan. “How else would he know that?”

“Goddess, how can you stand him?” yelled Hyacinth, flinging down his sewing. “Let me kill the gut-headed little bugger.”

Puck immediately retaliated by unbuttoning his front and creating an impressively large lake around himself. “Robiola di Roccaverano,” he chanted, his whine now overlaid with a patina of truculence. “Touch me and I’ll flood this hovel. Flood it, I say. And I’ll call the Mothers, see if I don’t. Taleggio, Ragusano, Stracchino.”

“Bathtard traitor.”

“I am not.” Puck shrugged. “Am not, I say. How could I be? I never gave a damn about any side, anywhere, at any time, and on any of the planes. I’m neutral. Impartial. Ambisexual. I always was. Always was, I say, right from the beginning. What was it to me whether the darts hit home or not? I never stuck to the rules, anyway. To start with the arrows were made of gold. Everything was sweetness and light and love. Where was the fun in that? Boring. I caught Vulcan on an off-day and persuaded him to make me some lead-tipped ones. That added base lust to the equation. Lust, I said. Then I ran up a few wooden ones myself and invented love’s down-side – marriage. A leaden arrow in one throbbing heart, gold one in the other, blackthorn splinter in a third – now that was potentially interesting. As for this damn silly them and they and all the rest of us gender nonsense, I couldn’t give a flying fuck how it turns out. And – let’s be clear – the only reason I agreed to help this great Morgan lump was because he promised to take me to Hertha for a pig-out – Ricotta, Pecorino Romano, Pecorino Sardo, Grana Padano, Casciotta di Urbino.” He paused. “You might as well help him, because if he goes, you’ll get rid of me as well. Toscano, Provolone, Scamorza, Quartirolo Lombardo—”

Backus threw up his hands. “If they’ve put a guard on the circle, that’s it, we don’t stand a chance.” His face contorted. “You know, I’ve got this very nasty picture of somebody being torn limb from limb.”

“Indigestion,” Sernunnos said hastily, “probably.”

“There must be another way out,” pleaded Morgan. “What about this Lilith and Eve business? Apparently I have to get permission off one to see the other to ask permission to leave.”

Rowan sniggered. “Not that it helps much, but tradition has it they’re one and the same and that Lilith started calling herself Eve after she had her makeover. Apparently, it was during her hunter gathering phase. It didn’t last long.”

“Where can I find her?”

“Well,” Sernunnos began. “No, no, forget it. It’s just a human story.”

“What? Tell me.”

“According to legend, long ago, in the Golden Age, the Great Mother Goddess lived amongst us. Then something happened. We offended Her. Or something. Nobody remembers. Anyway, She left us and went back to Her celestial home in the sky. The only way to reach Her is by climbing to the top of the Great Tower and calling Her name. Unfortunately, the tower has no door, but the story promises that whoever can find a way in and succeed in making their way up the staircase will be granted his heart’s desire. Of course, as I say, it’s only a human story.”

However hard they searched, none of them could find the smallest crack in the stonework, not even the ridge of an old doorway plastered over. Already the sun was edging down towards the east. If it had been a halfway decent tale then the outline of an ancient entrance would have been revealed by the descending shadows. Or some clue: runes, perhaps, an ancient riddle, or a raddled old jackdaw on the point of expiry flapping down to impart vital information. But it wasn’t that sort of story and there was nothing.

The small crowd had already started to yawn and disperse when a familiar rumpus started up in the distance. Morgan winced and began throwing himself against the wall. Maybe it was his imagination, sparked by desire to save his shoulder, but he thought he could make out a faint echo in the east-north-east sector.

“Rowan, it’s hollow just here. Bring me a sledgehammer or something. Quick – before that damned pig brings Mum’s Army running.”

Too late, a hideously swollen Venus had homed in on Morgan and was bearing down on him, slavering with adoration. This was the man who had given her both soul cake and freedom. This was her brother, her hero, her friend.

“That’s no pig,” bawled Puck, above Venus’ express-train shriek of recognition. “That’s no pig, I say. I remember pigs. Mean little bleeders with bristles, pigs. They lived on acorns.”

“That’s inbreeding for you,” Morgan assured him. “And nurture, and getting away with it. It leads to bigger and better forms of Piggishness.” He flattened his body against the stonework and watched in dismay as time went out of sync. His eyes misted over. Venus floated silently forwards in soft-focus slow motion, as did Di and her muscle-bound cohorts.

“Move!” shrieked Puck, kicking his shin. “Move, I say.”

Morgan was instantly plunged back into a nightmare world of pounding feet and rising dust cloud. Of sow bark and bitching imprecation. Of glistening snout and gaping chops. Of flailing arms, and stout legs working like pistons. Of threats, and promises, threats of promises, and promises of threats. There was no escape. This time they were both destined to meet their various ends. Self-preservation maliciously held its breath until the very last possible moment, and then injected a massive dose of adrenalin into his bloodstream. Galvanised into action, Morgan leapt to one side a fraction of a second before Venus slammed straight through his shadow and into the wall, dislodging stones and a great section of wattle and daub panelling. Her head remained jammed in the hole. Beyond, he made out a narrow stone staircase curving away into pitch black oblivion. In that same instance he became aware of hands reaching out for him and took a running jump over Piggy’s gigot, chump chop, fillet, loin, neck end and blade into dark and dubious safety. High above, a tiny speck of light appeared and disappeared. The tower was so narrow that his outstretched elbows grazed the sides. Up he went, as fast as he dared, spurred on not only by the desire to evade recapture but also to escape from the remonstrative bubbles of saliva floating up from Puck’s blow-hole vomitory. Each had the name of a further variety of cheese trapped inside it, released as the bubbles burst against the dripping stone walls.

Remedou. Friesekaas. Quark. Appenzeller. Emmental. Friburgeois. Bergkäse. Raclette. Gruyere. Royalp-Tilsiter. Saanen. Limburger. Mondseer. Sapsago. Butterkäse. Sbrinz. Tête-de-Moine. Serra da Estrela. Vacherin Mont d’Or. São Jorge. Boerenkaas. Commissiekaas. Edam. Gouda. Leyden. Leerdammer. Maasdam. Bruder Basil. Oschtjepka. Sirene. Mandur. Burduf Brinza. Siraz. Liptauer. Abertam. Katschkawalj. Balaton. Lajta. Bryndza. Liptoi. Oszczpek. Podhalanskiiiiiiii.”

As the patriarchs tell it, Eve was responsible for bringing death, sin and sorrow into the world. But she was the second wife. It is said that, Lilith, the first, was even worse. Yahweh created Adam and Lilith together, but he used clay for Adam and – retrospectively, we must suppose – filthy and impure sediments of the earth to produce Lilith. Thus, she turned out self-centred, demonic, and totally evil. And that is what happens, it’s said, when women have the presumption to claim equality with men.

Well, he couldn’t go back. He had to go on. And on and on he went, sometimes not climbing at all, but hauling himself horizontally, knee to elbow in something approaching a foetal crouch, along the snake’s-gut of a passage, sometimes hurtling arse over tip – downwards, maybe, or not. But, in spite of such apparent evidence to the contrary, Morgan guessed he must still be making spiral progress upwards by the way the tiny patches of light before and behind appeared and disappeared by turns as he shuffled towards probable annihilation at the gates of the Celestial Abode, Eden, Paradise, the Queendom of the Blest.

It was slow work, much like clawing his way out of a treacle well. And as he continued, he remembered many things. And the things Morgan remembered were too painful to remember, so he tried to forget them, but they would not be forgotten. He started to sniffle, but was forced to stop by the need to listen.

The ‘Song of the Cheese’ had long since ceased, only to be replaced by something worse – a faint click and skitter of claw against stone, distant, but rapidly gaining on him. Rats terrified him, dead or alive, even in the Welsh – Llygoden ffrengig – literal translation, French mice, which didn’t help a whisker, whatever political nose-thumbing was implicated. The farm had been overrun with them in the early days of Caradoc and Rhonwen’s reign, great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, grave old plodders, gay young friskers. Poison had been laid, but not all of the corpses removed. Fifty years later, mummified remains were still being discovered under floorboards and along attic beams, teeth grinning malevolence from tight, leathery masks, fine thick whippy tails a trifle dusty, but otherwise untouched by time. No one dared lay a finger on them, though Dai had dislodged one or two with a very long pole.

Morgan glanced over his shoulder. Life had afforded him no protection against rats. Not a sausage. If his literary bent had been encouraged he could have tried rhyming them to death, as did the satirist Seanchan Torpest when they ate his dinner—

Rats have sharp snouts

Yet are poor fighters

whereupon ten fell dead on the spot. But that was in the seventh century, and in Ireland. Weeping with self-pity, Morgan continued to climb.

Each step was now a massive block of stone, the riser measuring between two and three feet. Behind him, the noises had grown into explosive snorts and snuffles which ricocheted along the walls to overtake him. Persuaded that the pursuing rodents were distant relatives of the Porth rats, intent on belated revenge, he put on a burst of speed, rapidly hauling himself upwards, gibbering with terror.

The temperature plummeted. A thin wind began to grizzle around his ears, blocking out every other sound. Snowflakes started to fall, gently at first, riding the wind, and then whirling into a ferocious blizzard which brought him to a standstill. Something nudged the back of his ankles. He yelped, turned, kicked, and began inching backwards again, not daring to look at whatever it was. His reaching hands discovered an alcove in the wall. Stepping into it, he tied knots in his sheet and swung it across the opening to deter his assailants while he waited for the snow to clear. It took its time. When it finally thinned, he saw the steps continued on upwards for, at most, seven, then stopped abruptly in mid-air. No sign of Rattus rattus, but Adam was here had been scrawled on the wall. Behind him was another passage, dank and dark, and smelling of that very offensive toadstool, Phallus impudicus, the stinkhorn – either that, or a very dead something or other. The floor here was of puddled clay; the roof vaulted by massive, interlacing roots.

At the end of the passage was a small hole fringed with greenery.

He crawled out onto a grassy plain dotted with small blue flowers. A single, scab-barked old tree trunk, several hours round, stretched up into the massed clouds. Few leaves were visible from below, but clearly this tree bore fruit. The ground beneath it was knee-deep in cores at various stages of decay; more continued to drop at his feet as he stood staring upwards. The air was tainted by a smell as nastily sweet as belched scrumpy.

“Thanks for waiting,” snarled Mercher. Morgan jumped.

“How did you get here?”

“Since I’ve been bawling your name for the last half hour, I won’t demean either of us by answering that. Call it misplaced canine loyalty, but I thought you could do with the support. Ignored me, didn’t you? And finally, you kicked me in the teeth. Charming.”

“I thought you were—” Maybe that would be better left unsaid. Morgan looked at the iron steps hammered into the trunk. He looked at Mercher. “We need to go up. I suppose I’ll have to carry you.”

How does a mere man address the mother of all living? Morgan softly called out: “Ma’am?” After a while he tried: “Highness,” then: “Your Ladyship?” No answer was forthcoming. In the meantime, he’d never seen such clouds. To one side of the stout branches reared fair weather clouds, massive broccoli-headed mountain ranges, to the other, a mackerel sky, with spectacularly elongated shapes drifting against an azure backdrop, threatened imminent sea-change. In the centre, and feeding both possibilities, a shifting, trembling mass of pure white new cloud boiled over the edge of an invisible milk pan.

It was a breathtaking display of the awesome beauty of nature, ruined for ever by the gradual emergence of the night hag: first a leprous foot with long yellow toenails curling upwards, then ankles with crimped folds of flakily elephantine hide, a shapeless varicose-roped calf, a horribly droop-fleshed thigh, a massive triple-chinned arse, and finally the whole – an unspeakably disgusting crone shaped like a collapsing blancmange, as loathsome naked as he’d always suspected old women must be, a sight for making the eyes sore, for making the flesh creep, desire wilt, joie de vivre flee – with pendulous breasts swinging against a deeply-pleated stomach flap which mercifully concealed her pudenda, and liver-spot-dappled skin cankerous as the tree bark itself. If this was Eve then no wonder the human race was, for the most part, barely presentable never mind beautiful. If it was the Lilith depicted in the painted ceiling, then age hadn’t improved her.

“Bit low in the undercarriage,” snickered Mercher, fighting off his master’s restraining grasp in order to sink up to the neck in cloud.

Morgan shuddered. One thing was sure: he’d get no change here. The old hag was clearly senile judging by the way she was chain-eating unripe knobs of green fruit from the branches above and about her. The perfected technique suggested she’d been at it for a very long time. Not that this pastime appeared pleasurable. At each reach and pluck, a small moan left her lips, as if chronic repetitive strain injury had set in. And as she bit into the flesh her jowls quivered, her mouth puckered a sloes-in-vinegar grimace.

“Excuse me, Your Majesty.”

“Ugh?” She screwed up rheumy eyes. “I know that voice. Is that you, Adam?”

“Er, no, my name’s Morgan.” Venturing closer he saw the ancient matriarch was propped along a cleft branch surrounded by about a hundred greyish cats, all staring, and frantically scratching in unison.

The ghastly vision coyly drew a few wisps of water vapour round her flesh. “I knew you’d come creeping back to your Lilith sooner or later,” she mumbled through a mouthful of pale green crunch.

“Thing is, I’m here to beg a favour. I want—”

“If it’s about having a dog, the answer’s still no.”

“It’s not about dogs, it’s—”

“No dogs in here. And that also applies to the orangutan, the skelluidan, the mammoth, and the farocles. The answer to all or any of them is still No.”

“If you could just stop and listen to what I have to say—”

Lilith stopped. “Stop, I can’t stop. I’m far too busy.”

“It would only take a minute.”

“Stop, indeed – when I can’t keep up as it is. I have to do all this single-handed you know. No help whatsoever. You want to know why I’m doing it, is that it? Well, this is the Tree of Knowledge. Eating the fruit thereof was what started the downward slide. A bloody silly experiment, if you ask me. Knowledge brings unhappiness. Quote, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, unquote. And ignorance is bliss. Ergo the world can only be happy without knowledge, so if I dispose of every last apple from the tree—”

“But—”

“Nobody will have to learn anything ever again, teachers will become extinct—”

“But—”

“And Mankind be a lot happier.”

“BUT THEY’RE NOT APPLES.”

She stopped mid-chomp for the second time in a fair few millennia. A chunk of unripe fruit fell from her mouth as she cupped a hand to her ear. “Eh? What’s that?”

“The fruit – they’re pears. This is a pear tree.”

“Not apples?”

Morgan shook his head, hoping blame wouldn’t attach to the messenger. Lilith’s eyes bulged. She spat vigorously, broke off a twig, and began cleaning remnants of pear flesh from between her teeth.

“That vile, misbegotten, forked-tongue, lying worm-cast. Right back at the beginning you said he wasn’t to be trusted. I should have listened to you then.”

“I’m not Adam.”

“When I think of the aeons I’ve wasted forcing down those revolting green knobs. They never ripen, you know, it never got any better, and all for what? For nothing, that’s what. LUCIFER.”

Something rustled in the leaves. The clouds began to take on colour as the serpent slithered indolently towards them, winding itself widdershins round a series of branches: hyacinth beds, rainbows, sunlight through stained glass windows. As it finally emerged from the shadows, Morgan felt his jaw drop. There look, the Bible was wrong again. Nothing subtle about the creature. Each scale was painted differently, and he’d never seen colours of such intensity – some he had no names for. He stood transfixed, overcome by a sense of being surrounded by other colours he couldn’t see, sounds he couldn’t hear, of forever seeing as real what was unreal, of never knowing what really—

“Snap out of it,” yelled Lilith. “Ignore him and his mind games. Colour’s all in the retinal photo-receptors. He’s black and white, the same as everything else.”

“Forgive me,” murmured Lucifer. “I picked the wrong toadstool. From your quick lurch towards the outreaches of philosophical enlightenment I imagined we were dealing with psilocybe. Never mind. So, what can I do for you?” He hung poised between them, his scarlet – or perhaps the illusion of scarlet – tongue flickering with interest from a face that was one minute all lizard and the next of remarkable androgynous beauty. “Well?”

“Lucifer, I’ll get straight to the point. Adam tells me that these,” she pushed a half-eaten embryo fruit into his face, “are not apples as you told me they were. He says they are pears.”

The serpent’s expression changed to one of bewilderment. “I told you that? Are you sure it was me? I don’t remember specifically telling you they were apples.”

“I said to you: Is this the apple tree, Lucifer? Are those the apples? You said they were. What could be plainer than that?”

“No, I said it looked like the apple tree,” said Lucifer carefully. “You decided that it was. Then you asked if those were apples. I said that if it was the apple tree, then logically those must be the apples. Sound reasoning, I think you’ll agree?” He wound himself closer. “However, now that you come to mention it, they do indeed look like pears.”

The reptilian head swung towards Morgan. “How kind of you to draw it to our attention, whatever your name is.”

“Cut the crap, Lucifer,” snapped Lilith. “We both know it was deliberate. Don’t know when to stop do you, chaos-monger? Perhaps your mind’s finally going, since you can’t even remember my help-meet’s name.”

“I’m not Adam.”

“He says he’s not Adam.”

“Who else could he be? He’s here. He’s hairy. He’s got a dog, too. Don’t think I didn’t notice. Mothers see everything.”

“You’re not my—”

“I’m everybody’s mother, you silly git. I was the first. I created myself from nothing. I cloned myself a silly sister for company. Then the daft bint produced you. I warned her not to play around with her genes, but she would do it. Trying to produce a creature wise as serpents and harmless as doves; all she got was a scrap of serpent tail where it could only cause harm and a nasty tendency to violence. Still, between us we devised ways of making the best of things and got to quite like it in the end. Until you lot got ideas above your station and tried playing us off against each other.” Lilith cackled. “Then I re-absorbed her – or ate her. I can’t remember which.”

There was a short silence. Lucifer gave a discreet cough.

Lilith looked abashed. “All right, it was all me. Cloning came later. I just wanted to know what being subordinate felt like. But I’m still the Mother of All. Satisfied? Obviously not – I can see from your face that’s not what you’ve been told. So which version are they peddling at the moment, a sky father giving birth from his mouth, arse, thigh, or rib? Or are we back to the mind?”

“Still on the rib,” tittered Lucifer. “Though there is a school of thought—”

“And you can put a sock in it.” Lilith scowled at the top three inch layer of Mercher visible above the cloud. “Chancing it a bit, weren’t you, Adam, bringing a forbidden creature back with you?”

“He’s not Adam. He’s fallen through from the Other Place, where women are still supposed to smile, shave their legs, and keep shtum. He’s got himself trapped, so he’s come up here with his creature hoping you’ll send him back.”

“That’s out of the question. He stays.”

“What about the dog?” demanded Morgan. “It stinks. It’s got fleas.”

Mercher rolled despairing eyes. “I’ve got fleas? Have you looked at those cats? They’re overrun – dripping vermin. At least I can draw breath between bites. Even as I speak, ten thousand of their buggers are packing up and preparing to migrate to my fur, solely for economic reasons.” Morgan affected not to hear.

“It’s vile. Even licks its own testicles—”

“And occasionally recycles pre-digested food. I know all that. Dogs don’t change. But what’s that beside our happiness?” After several decidedly inelegant efforts, Lilith managed to haul herself to her feet. “I forgive you everything – the missionary position, the blood-sucking stories, and the babby-napping slanders. I forgive your fuelling of centuries of hard-breathing incubus and succubus fantasies, even the bellybutton fetish. Oh, Adam, after all these long ages, how can you want to leave again? We’ve got so much lost time to make up for. Come here.”

She flung open her arms. A shower of scurf, cores and pips, some germinated, fell from innumerable nooks and crannies in unmentionable and best unimagined places. Morgan backed hurriedly away.

“I’m NOT Adam.”

The serpent smirked. “He’s not Adam.”

Lilith smacked its head. “You think I don’t know that? He’s young. He’s relatively healthy. He’ll do.” Brightening considerably, shedding centuries with each step, she began waddling through the sea of cloud. “Let’s be at him.”

“You’re the Great Mother!” Morgan shrieked. “You can’t carry on like that.”

“It sounds as if you haven’t read the unexpurgated versions of your own mythology. Love them and leave them – that’s always been the Great Goddess’ motto. Actually, it was a bit more down to earth than that, but who’s standing in judgement? You’ll do for starters.”

“Sod that.” Morgan searched with his feet for the first metal rung.

Strangely, it was a lot quicker clambering down than climbing up. So quick, in fact, that there was no time to devise a plan. Setting aside any thought that his presence might not be wanted there, would he be able to find his way back to the Men’s Refuge?

The moon had risen. It was already waning, but still huge and silver. Dead or alive, Venus had gone from the base of the tower, but signs of a struggle remained. Noxious slurry was splattered on the wall. Most of the ground was churned up and the flowers had fled from every shrub in the vicinity, but worse that this – much, much worse – was the sight of a trail of cores leading away into the distance. Somehow, Lilith had got here first. Slowly, carefully, he edged round the shattered wall.

“Got you!” hissed Di.

Harmony soon fled from the hall of the Mothers. “For the love of Lilith send him back,” one-and-all howled. “And send that bloody animal back with him. I’m covered with flea bites.”

“No good blaming the dog,” Morgan insisted. “It’s her cats that are the problem. Look at them scratching.” Not that it proved anything. Everyone was at it.

“Not possible,” Kerridwins growled, twitching and slapping. “Fleas went out with Adam.” She coughed politely in an attempt to draw Lilith’s attention back to the matter in hand, but the Great Mother Returned was too busy with her first square meal in a very long time, and with observing the rapid revitalisation of the body sacred. Kerridwins looked round at the assembled women. “Right, what’s it to be – out through the Portal, or into cold storage?”

“I really think –” began Thorns, to a chorus of sighs, groans, and head-shakings. “Look, he’s an idiot and a troublemaker and he doesn’t know his place, but that’s mainly because of the rogue chromosome. If he’d had the benefit of our therapy it wouldn’t be such a problem. However, he’s still a sentient being – albeit a low-level one – and it seems unfair not to give him the choice.”

Kerridwins grinned. “All right, my dear. You’ve got a kind heart, but we do still have his education to consider. He came here for a reason. Well, Git? Which would you prefer, a corrective spell in our museum, or uh going back?”

Morgan hesitated. The choice seemed straightforward, but he didn’t like the look in her eyes one little bit. “Back to the Welsh Marches?” he asked. “You mean going back to Mam’s and Dad’s farm?”

She nodded. “If that’s what you want. But just remember, Git, and this is very important, call on us three times asking to return and you stay forever.”

Morgan stared down into the massive cauldron, troubled by the thin sheen of ice crusting its milky waters. A few women, summoned to raise the temperature, blew torrid breaths across the surface.

“In you go,” commanded a smirking Kerridwins.

“What’s this?” Morgan hung back. Something was wrong. Why wasn’t Thorns here as an independent witness? “This isn’t the Portal. Why aren’t you sending me back the way I came?”

“Oh, this is better. That stone circle’s for the hoi polloi. This is the literary route. Rebirth via the cauldron means you get inspiration, knowledge, and – hopefully – illumination. Or perhaps you’ve changed your mind and decided to stay?”

“No, no, fine, whatever you say.” It could have been worse. After all, she could have sent him back through the partially cleft Presents, and hadn’t he suffered enough? Taking a deep breath, Morgan stepped into the cauldron. It was far deeper than he’d expected, right up to his chest before he reached the centre, but contrary to expectation the water was pleasantly warm. He tried to relax.

“Down you go,” purred Kerridwins, pushing him right under.

It was so dark in the kitchen that it took his eyes several minutes to adjust. At first the lack of light led Morgan to believe it was night, but he soon realised that the windows had been boarded over. Here and there, sunlight fingered through knotholes in the crudely cut planks. Apparently, things had not gone well in his absence. Plaster was falling off the walls, leaving exposed the centuries-old wattle panels. The floor was ankle-deep in filth. Several scrawny hens were conducting archaeological surveys in the corners. A pheasant, two ravens, several rabbits and what looked like a Pekinese dog bled from the beams. And where was Mam’s pride-and-joy dresser?

Some bloody squatters must have moved in. Jesus Christ, Morgan thought, it hadn’t taken them long to turn the place into a grade one shit-hole. Good job they were out or he’d have taught them a lesson that wouldn’t be forgotten in a hurry. But why hadn’t anyone stopped them? Surely even Pritchard-idle-Evans could have lifted a hand to phone the police. Violent eviction was called for. And an insurance claim to boot. This wasn’t the joyful homecoming he’d visualised.

Stumbling outside into the inevitable drizzle, he found the yard empty of stock. As he looked around, the hair on the back of his neck lifted. Orchard and garden were wastelands, armpit-high in weeds. The roofs of most outbuildings had caved in. His mini was a rusted hulk under an avalanche of partially composted hay. The enclosing wall was down. The gates were gone. Across the road, all that was left of Pritchard-Evans’ cottage was a grassed-over tump surrounded by blackened roof tiles. This hadn’t happened yesterday – nor in a year of yesterdays. When was he?

Morgan stopped dead, remembering Kerridwins’ self-satisfied expression, her words of warning. The evil bitch – this was all a game to her. She’d let him think he was getting what he wanted, but that was just part of the entertainment.

May we three All-Wise offer a word of advice at this point? The thing about wishes is that they very often do come true, but you have to be meticulously specific about what you’re asking for. Those whom the Goddess wishes to drive mad are first granted their heart’s desire. Wish in haste, repent at leisure. There’s a Welsh Marches Once Upon a Time warning tale, The Fairy Follower, which makes this perfectly clear. Some young know-it-all, mad with lust, brain-addled by love, too impatient to follow the scrimping, saving, wait until you can afford it, route to marriage prescribed by his elders and betters, called on the Fair Family, the Tylwyth teg, for help. Clear water was set for them. A meal of fine white bread and matured cheese prepared. One of the Other duly appeared, cleared the board, and agreed to grant the fool’s wishes. He got his riches all right, and marriage, but not, alas, to the object of his desire. His beloved dwindled and died. Instead, he found himself saddled with a cantankerous old money-bags widow who made his life living hell.

Now Morgan realised why Thorns hadn’t been there to see him off. Being the only one with a modicum of decency, she wouldn’t have stood for it. God damn it, now he’d have to go and eat humble pie; beg to be dispatched to his own time.

How to get back, that was the thing? Stone circle, he supposed. Muttering under his breath, Morgan trudged towards the hillside. Perhaps when he’d knocked a few heads together and made it clear that he wasn’t a bloke to be messed with, he could negotiate a proper return and persuade Thorns to accompany him.

“How do?”

Morgan jumped. What now? Seven foot square of Wild Man of the Hills blocking his path, that’s what, and each massive paw clutching a leather bucket slopping water over his filthy bare feet. Wild Man possessed a purple nose, wildly bloodshot eyes, and hair that had never in its long life met a comb.

“How do?” WM repeated, eyeing Morgan’s knotted sheet ensemble with childlike curiosity. He himself was dressed in some sort of cobbled together rawhide. “Be thee a friend from up country?”

Morgan gave a vague nod. “Yes, a friend.” The fellow looked harmless enough, in spite of his bulk and the scary backwoods get-up. Still, what the hell, it was his business if he wanted to take bloke-ism to the extreme. “You don’t happen to know the date, do you?”

“Ah.” Down went the buckets. Up came the hands. A few minutes of hair-tugging and scalp scratching galvanised the single brain cell into action. “’Tis Manday.”

“And the year?”

“’Tis All Zouls. Ah.” There was a short pause. Vaguely conscious that he hadn’t provided an entirely satisfactory answer, WM added: “Lew will know. Him will be here directly. He be bringing whome the bacon. I got to get on.”

Morgan watched him shamble into the house before resuming his resentful journey across meadow wrenched from Nature by his forefathers and now reclaimed by gorse and bracken, and the tall dead spikes of snawp. A path had been beaten to the stream, the lowest part of which was dug out to provide a muddy pool deep enough for the dipping of buckets. There was no sign of any attempt at farming, arable or otherwise. Mam would never have stood for this state of affairs. Things had certainly changed.

Suddenly terrified that the circle might have been destroyed, or simply ceased to exist, he began to run up the hill. He could see the stones, was in minutes of reaching them, when a hullabaloo from the castle ruins stopped him in his tracks. Screams, howls, yells, the beating of drums, and one final screech of triumph was followed by a profound silence. Minutes later, half a dozen more wild men streamed down the bank carrying a naked corpse. As they came closer he saw it was a large gilt.

“Is that Venus? Have you finished off poor old Venus?”

“Naw,” said the red-headed bloke. “This here pig is Marpessa. Every afternoon us catches she and every night us eats she, and next day she be alive again and us catches she again and eats she, and next day—”

“Yes,” Morgan put in hurriedly, “I get the picture. Big, isn’t she? Eat all of her, do you?”

“Ah. Every last bit of her, for us must. That’s the way of it. It’s we eat she or she eats we, see? Sometimes her comes little and sometimes her comes big and sometimes her be a she and sometimes her be an he and sometimes her be near and sometimes her be far and we has to go miles and miles and miles and miles to catch she.”

“Ah,” chorused the others, “Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah.”

“Plenty to go round,” suggested he of the orange hair, introducing himself as Mighty Lew. “And while we’re waiting you can help we beat the bounds.”

Morgan glanced nervously at the standing stones. Half an hour wouldn’t hurt, he decided. After all, the stones weren’t likely to run away, and he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten.

They trooped into the squalid kitchen which was now full of acrid smoke. Two enormous man-sized saucepans simmered on the battered Aga. The pig was heaved onto the greasy table. Without further ado, Lew seized an axe, climbed up and began unsystematically chopping the carcass into manageable segments. It was a messy and desperate business which excited the hens to the limits of their endurance. Apart from flying bone splinters, an escaping squirm or two of intestine, the eyes – which the WM pocketed on the sly – and any blood which couldn’t be caught, every other last bit went into the pans: head, tail, trotters, bristly skin, lackadaisically cleaned chitterlings, and various other mangled organs from which Morgan averted his eyes. Hunger fled.

“Right,” Lew dipped his hands in the less full saucepan to clean them, “now for the boundaries.”

Morgan followed the gang out to the semi-derelict building which had once been the granary. Here, a considerable quantity of crudely made bows, spears and cudgels hung from nails, and the old feed bins were full of large stones. Each of the men selected a favourite weapon and filled his leather bottle with a pungent liquid attempting secondary fermentation in a lard-covered barrel by the door. Something gleamed yellow from the cobwebbed window. It was Dai’s chainsaw, guaranteed for life on account of its foreign ancestry and excessive price. The blade was corroded, but a little fuel remained and Morgan was sure it could still inflict telling damage in any hand-to-hand conflict. He shouldered it, accepting at the same time some of the pungent liquid, trying to ignore the container’s close resemblance to an inflated pig’s bladder.

Mighty Lew and his followers set off up the valley road, now little more than a dirt track overlaid in places with scabs of blistered tarmac. Looking back, Morgan could see that the farmhouse was the only remaining dwelling in the valley. There was no sign of the church. Even the pub had disappeared. “Where are we going, exactly?”

Lew paused at the crest of the hill. “Us ain’t got much of a patch. They English bitches nabbed most of the good land.” Facing west, he pointed to a line of trees marching along the top of the valley, and east, to what looked like an artificially constructed ridge, a miniature echo of Offa’s Dyke. “This here is about it, east to west. Us goes north till us hits the Heavingjobby Chapter, and south until us gets to the Berlinjobby one.”

“What – you walk right round it every day?”

“And the rest.” Lew looked at him amazed. “Ain’t you done it before? Blokes up where you come from must be doing it, too. Every chapter do do it. It’s the only way to keep them out, ain’t it?”

“Uh,” said Morgan. The others all stared at him. Everyone knew that. Their eyes narrowed suspiciously. Then, enlightenment dawned on Mighty Lew’s face. He grinned and clapped Morgan on the back.

“Ah, ’tis about porkicide, ain’t it? That right, ain’t it – you ain’t made a kill yet? No need to be ashamed, lad. We all been there.”

“Ah?” chorused the others, “Ah?” and, Ah?” and, “Ah?” and, “Ah?” and, “Ah?”

“And that’s why you been sent to us, ain’t it – to sort out this Pig business and see if us old hands can make a proper provider of you.” Lew turned to the others. “Take him out tomorrow, won’t us lads? Make sure him gets his pig?”

“Ah,” enthused the others, with nods, and gap-toothed grins, “Ah,” and, Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah.”

“But for today, us’ll let he be an honorary bloke.”

“Ah,” the others agreed, “Ah,” and, Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah,” and, “Ah.”

They continued towards the boundary. Morgan saw that a large stake had been hammered into the ground a few feet from the road. When he was near enough to see that it was a totem pole covered with carved symbols indicating, with their ever optimistic upwards thrust, the male gender, the leather bottles were unstoppered, heads were thrown back, and a stream of greenish-yellow liquor was aimed at the back of the throat. Morgan felt obliged to follow suit…and choked. Never, in his entire life, had he encountered anything so foul. It was worse than the pondweed tea, far worse than senna pods, and worse even than Mam’s experimental health brews. It was about on a par with something pretty bad, though greener and murkier, lingering at the edge of his memory.

“’Tis a bit different from your recipe, I dare say.” Lew visibly swelled with pride, assuming that the pained expression on Morgan’s face was awe. “’Tis pork and dandelion champagne with wild barley – does the trick right enough.” And with that the whole troupe took turns, one after the other, at peeing copiously along the boundaries.

Getting a Billy goat to pee along the boundaries of a smallholding, or attaching bits of rag soaked in its urine or, even better, its rutting spray, to hedges or barbed wire fences, is a time-honoured method of keeping out foxes. In the Marches, and on into rural Wales, it is assumed that human male urine is a reasonable substitute. Women have always found such practices repellent. In this context, using dandelions was a fairly sensible idea. Leontodon taraxacum, dent-de-leon, pis-en-lit, wet-the-bed, pishamoolag, pissimire, is an extremely effective diuretic. The throughput achieved on this particular occasion was remarkable.

Piss a-bed, Piss a-bed, 
Barley butt,
Your bladder’s so heavy
You can’t get up.

“Have another drink,” suggested Lew, aiming high. “Gotta be done, for ’tis the only way to keep the bitches out.”

“How far away are they?” Morgan felt obliged to keep the conversation going, if only to mask his inability to contribute fully to the proceedings. Lew sniffed, and shook, and laced up.

“Five miles that-a way,” he jerked his head towards Wales, “less there,” with a nod at England. “Used to be that all the white witches lived in Wales, and all the black ones in England, but you know women. Can’t keep nothing cut and dried.”

Having emptied the first bottle, Lew had reached the amiable stage of intoxication. Morgan quickly substituted his hardly touched one and gauged it pretty safe to ask a few more questions.

“How did it all come about, Lew? Women with their own nation states for God’s sake? I mean, men and women, didn’t we all used to live together?”

Lew frowned. “Don’t they teach you no history up there? Where did you say you come from? Clun way, was it?”

“Near there,” agreed Morgan, tipping up the empty bottle.

“Well, wherever it bist, them shoulda told you.” Lew also took another long swig. He grinned. “Look, yours be empty. Here, get some of mine down you.” He watched. “That’s right, that’s the way. Now – how it came about was the mothers, see, them got the upper hand and tried to phase males out. When it come to choosing whether they’d have boy or girl sprogs, they all started choosing wenches. Supposed to be, what were it they said? Oh-ah, females were less trouble and higher achievers and more likely to look after them in their old age.” He sniggered. “They soon changed their minds when the Disaster come and they lost all their technowatsit.”

“Disaster,” echoed Morgan. “Technowatsit.”

“Advantage wiped out in an instant. Us all had to go back to the old ways.”

“Old ways.”

“Too late now – we ain’t budging. Not after the way we was treated. Thing you gotta unnerstand, Morg, is we got the magic chromosome and them bizzoms, they ain’t having it. No danger.”

“Chromosome,” said Morgan. “Not having it. But doesn’t that mean the end of human life?”

“Ah. That’s right, Morg. You got it in one. Hold on a few years, us can have every bit of land, far as Marpessa can roam. They bitches won’t be bothering we no more. Serve them right, and all.”

“But men won’t survive, either—”

“Have another drink,” insisted Lew, brushing logic aside. “And help we finish watering they boundaries.”

Morgan’s brain fogged over. At the same time, compassion stirred somewhere behind his pectorals. Men had it tough. What a waste of life this was, this endless downing of copious quantities of alcohol for the express purpose of producing copious quantities of urine. Women again: truly they were at the bottom of all the misery of the world. God damn it, why shouldn’t blokes live peacefully on their own, minding their simple business, without this constant pissing around for personal freedom?

“I’ve got a better idea,” he announced. “The Marches has been lumbered with holding England and Wales apart for far too long. Let’s cut ourselves free forever. Float out to sea. Become an independent testosterone island republic.”

“Ow we going to do that then, Morg?” Lew’s tone was kindly, but patronising.

“Ah?” came the chorus, “Ah?” and, Ah?” and, “Ah?” and, “Ah?” and, “Ah?”

Morgan grinned. With a flourish, he started up the chainsaw. His audience hastily retreated, howling profanities. The blade bit and began gouging a deep channel through the red Hereford-Radnor clay. Lew nonchalantly swaggered back and straddled the trench.

“Missed a bit!” he yelled.

“What?” Morgan’s leg paid the price of his inattention. The blade chose that precise moment to strike a stone and bounce spitefully back, completely severing his left foot at the ankle. He looked at it, sitting there, expressionless, abstracted, detached. Reality kicked in. In so far as that was practically possible.

Oh, shit. It hurt. It was time to go. “I WANT TO COME BACK!”


Eliza Granville embarked on a legal career before abandoning it in favour of a bohemian lifestyle. After coming to her senses some years later, she returned to university – BA & MA University of Plymouth, PhD Aberystwyth University – and began writing in earnest. Her stories can be found in UK, US, and SA magazines, and in anthologies. Of several novels published, the most recent are Gretel and the Dark (Hamish Hamilton) and Once Upon a Time in Paris (CentreHouse Press).

Tagore Prize 2021-22 Awarded to Sudeep Sen

Review by Peter Cowlam

All of us here at Ars Notoria are delighted at the news that our poetry editor, Sudeep Sen, has been awarded the prestigious Tagore Prize for 2021–22. The Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, a literary honour in India conferred annually for published works by Indian authors, recognises novels, short stories, poetry and drama. Sudeep’s work to be so honoured is his Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation, a collection of poetry, prose and photography, published by Pippa Rann Books & Media UK (182pp hb).

Sudeep receives his award

The judges’ citation reads—

‘Sudeep Sen writes a powerful and intimate testimony to the human life inexorably and agonisingly devolving, in real time and in direct confrontation with Nature that runs its rebalancing course, keeps the Death by its side and doesn’t shiver at the sight of human arrogance. The impact Anthropocene is making, as a collection of observations that directly address the conundrum of our present and our future, but also in regard to the innovative utilisation of genre, is impossible to overestimate.’ 

The author’s reply reads as follows—

‘I am delighted that Anthropocene, has been awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. This book, which coalesced during the pandemic, is essentially a plea for positivity and prayer in these fervent times. Using multiple literary genres and tropes, it endeavours to address the wider geo-politics of our time. I hope this award will serve to sensitise a greater number of people to very urgent issues that need acute and immediate attention – such as climate change, and our global need for unity and humanism. “Hope, heed, heal – our song in present tense.”’ 
With the coveted prize

It might be recalled that at the time of the book’s launch, Ars Notoria carried a review, which is reproduced below.


The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been proposed as the definition of the geological epoch dating from the start of significant human impact on the earth, and on its ecosystems. Anthropocene is also the title of Sudeep Sen’s latest (multi-genre) book of poetry, prose and photography – published in the UK in a handsome hardback edition from Pippa Rann Books. I have a feeling this won’t be the last poetic (and literary) outcry against the ravages we inflict on our planet, with the cost not only to ourselves.

While a reversal of human rapacity is the clarion call of our era, growing louder by the day, it’s far from clear that timely correctives will be put in place sufficient to avert ultimate catastrophe. Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate change is a reality, and that dangerous levels of CO2 and methane are rising in our atmosphere, there is vested interest, there are powerful lobbies – of governments and corporations – doggedly resistant to climate treaties and any meaningful change in consumer habits. Meanwhile the globe is subject to weather extremes, coral reefs suffer bleaching, seas and rivers fill with plastic, micro-plastics enter the food chain, over-trafficked towns and cities are obliged to impose congestion and emission charges. Plastic pollution has even been detected in human placenta.

That’s the grand narrative. But what of the personal? Anthropocene is divided into nine parts, and roughly these comprise, pessimistically, a survey of the background realities of the globe as it is today, an apocalyptic vision of the world as it degenerates, the impact of the pandemic in collective and individual terms, then, as an optimistic contrast, there are skyscape photographs taken from the author’s terrace in Delhi, there is a celebration of persons, places and geological phenomena, there are the consolations of light, friendship and human togetherness, in balance with strictures imposed by nations in lockdown, with a strategy for survival of those restrictions with our mental health intact. Finally there is an epilogue.

In Part 1, the prologue, the poet is fulsome in his prose description of what he terms the ‘choreograph [of] the seasonal orchestra’, the first of many alliances of his poetic method with music (somewhere later in the book we infer music as his restorative). Frida Kahlo heads up this section, with an epigraph: ‘I paint flowers so they will not die.’ But death is the stark reality, with a reported news feature from ‘the President of the island nation of Kiribati […] informing the rest of the world that [with rising sea levels] the first country to be submerged would be theirs – and that their people would be the first “climate refugees”.’ More of the politics is touched on, with the world and its elites taking not enough notice of what is actual – the planet’s ecological crisis, with it the resurgence of fascism, the pandemic, and resulting from it the misery of enforced migration, desperate peoples dispossessed in their droves. Where once the artist celebrated nature in its colour and diversity, now there is hard descent into warnings against its destruction. The weather has certainly changed.

Part 2 begins with a plaint against human folly in its rapacity, ‘where everything is ambition, / everything is desire, everything is nothing’ (the poem ‘Disembodied’, p28). We are confronted with variants of the apocalyptic: ‘…over-heated air sucks out everything’; ‘Rain where there never was, / no rain where there [once] was.’; ‘Climate patterns [in] total disarray’; ‘…man-made havoc.’; ‘Earthquakes – overground, underground, / undersea’; ‘destruction, death’; ‘cyclone, flood, / pestilence, pollution.’; ‘Stillness, ever still – all still-born’ (‘Global Warming’, p30), and in ‘Rising Sea Levels’ (p31) there is a granite outcrop that once jutted out of the ‘ebullient’ sea, fifty metres from the shore, but is seen no more. ‘Asphyxia’, the poem on page 37, tips its hat to Eliot, in an unreal city, with a yellow fog, and yellow smoke, and urges ‘Sweet Yamuna’ (not the Thames, but a river in northern India) to run softly, till the poet of our day has ended not his song but his dirge. On page 38, in ‘Summer Heat’, macadam melts into a viscous black sea, a neem tree is bleached of its natural colour, power lines are down, in all there is limitless barrenness, while on page 39, in ‘Amaltas’, ‘sparking laburnums / […] ignite, incinerate’ under a searing 48°C. Some vision, where the city is reduced in appearance to that of a ‘glass mirage’ (‘Heat Sand’, p40), and where the science fraternity is telling us of ‘new highs’, where ‘meteorological indices shatter’ (‘Afternoon Meltdown’, p41), ‘unfinished flyovers // collapse’ (‘Concrete Graves’, p43). The contrast to excessive heat is given us in ‘Endless Rain’ (page 44), but the rain is followed by drought, then by an unstoppable monsoon (‘Shower, Wake’, p47). Examples of what ails human agency in all this is summed in bronchial disorders (the physical) and the tragedy of accentuated social division (the psychological).

Part 3, ‘Pandemic’, bears the subtitle ‘Love in the Time of Corona’, an enforced disposition Marquez (who is surely invoked) would have immediately understood. Page 54 reproduces the front page of The New York Times (a) as a mortician’s black slab (or so it seemed to this reader) and (b) a roll of the dead, names listed when the US death rate as a result of the virus was touching 100,000, responded to in ‘Obituary’ (page 55) as a conflation of ‘micro point-size fonts / on an ever inflating pandemic’. In ‘Obituary 2: Nine Pins’ (page 61) the poet names those personally he has lost to the pandemic, and amid a fourteen-haiku sequence (‘Corona Haiku’, pp62–64) the question is asked ‘will we find a more / compassionate world, after / this pandemic’s death?’ One suspects that with our current crop of leaders, and the multinationals that have got them in their pocket, we cannot bank on it. As to our mental health, ‘lockdown’s uneasy / solitude – turning into / another disease’ (page 64) does not give us hope of instant remedies, once the viral threat has passed, despite some few emollients (see Part 4, ‘Contagion’).

Part 4, ‘Contagion’. Can they salve the pain, a ‘eucalyptus steam inhalation, Ventolin sprays’, a ‘mixed concoction of ginger’, ‘black pepper, turmeric and organic honey’ (‘Implosion’, p79)? Or with these is there only ‘temporary respite’ (ibid)? Can machine technology ease the stress, with a charge of air from an electric vent? ‘I like this hellishly good blast that shakes all the embedded molecules in my bones’ (‘Icicles’, p81). ‘Fever Pitch’ (page 82), which in its epigraph recalls Thom Gunn and his man with night sweats, has its variation on that theme in an age of climate change and contagion: ‘The unknown boiling and freezing points that I hide within myself provide the ultimate enigma that even the most specialized doctors and architects find hard to map.’ Here more than ever throughout these poems we see what in the poet’s mind exists as the opposition, seldom a dialogue, between art and science. In their conflicting strategies in defining the human malaise ‘there is no room for unscientific thought’, or more fully, from ‘Heavy Water’, pp87-89)—

‘Families of electrons, protons and neutrons speed away, whirring in patterned loops, forgetting all the while that the heart of their orbit may actually feel and breathe. But in science, there is no room for unscientific thought – as if science and the arts, coolness and emotionality were mutually incompatible or different from each other.’ 

In a pandemic the truth of our mortality is brought closer into consciousness (‘Preparing For a Perfect Death’, p91)—

‘Get you papers in order – choose / your inheritors fairly – with love, care. // Outline clearly – who gets what, / what they are required to execute.’

And in ‘Icarus’ (pp92–93) there might even be a death wish: ‘The image of Icarus has been flying around / in my head. I cannot get rid of it….’ ‘I pray for Icarus to return to take me / away….’ But here among us earth-dwellers who have not crashed from the sky there are still life’s attractions. Instance Dinesh Khanna’s photograph on page 96, precursor to a meal (feasting, a social event), of chopped red onions, chopped red peppers and a clove of garlic on a chopping board with knives, despite the poet’s irresistible urge to make a crucifix out of the latter. ‘Corona Red’ (page 97) is the poem that accompanies (‘…is this a new metaphor of our / times?’). And after the metaphor, what are the other symptoms of our troubled era? The testing of friendships in enforced social distancing (‘Scar’, p99)? The alarming rate at which both fake news and the coronavirus replicate (‘Ghalib in the Time of Crisis’, pp100–101)? They are certainly among the leading contenders.

Part 5, subtitled ‘Skyscapes’, sees text give way to a series of photos the poet took from his terrace in Delhi, with his focus on a single subject (an horizon washed with trees, low-rise flat-roofed buildings and their attachments), under a big sky and subject to differing lighting conditions, ranging from evening twilight to cloudy to inky to fiery sunsets.

Part 6, ‘Holocene’, scientifically the interval of geologic time, approximately the last 11,700 years of Earth’s history, wherein the influence of human activity has been so profound it is deemed appropriate to ascribe its own name (cp ‘Anthropocene’). Poems in this section include a celebration of persons, places, and the terrible majesty of geological phenomena: ‘Four centuries ago, Akrotiri’s ancient site fell / grandly to volcanic death, victim of several quakes’ (‘Akrotiri’, p121). There is a homage to Derek Walcott. English hours take in a visit to Herefordshire, and with it the concretion of passing moments, with ‘…the kind of clock I want to measure time by – / time that depends / on the company of those who care – / time minutely layered / on this open windblown Herefordshire terrain…’ (‘Witherstone’, pp122–125). Another sequence of haiku (‘Undercurrents: 20 Lake Haiku’, pages 126–128) offers similar lyricism: ‘geese squeak, cormorants / dive, fish summersault…’ We are in Marseilles when, philosophically, the question is asked ‘Have these voyagers left something behind, / or are they yearning / to complete the incompleteness / in their lives?’ (‘Disembodied 2: Les Voyageurs’, p129). The section ends with ‘Disembodied 3: Within’ (page 130), and further philosophical probing: ‘…life, birth, death – / regermination, rejuvenation, nirvana.’

Part 7, ‘Consolation’, cinematically introduced by Stanley Kubrick: ‘However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.’ In life there is hope, and in death there are hopes for an afterlife (‘Burning Ghats, Varanasi’, (pages 136–137)—

‘In the super-heated pyre, I hear another ritual pot break,
		another skull crack, another soul take flight.
I see some shore-temples slow-sink
					into the swallowing river –
effects of unpredictable tides and climate change
	taking with them, both the mortal and the immortal –
Holocene’s carbon-footprint – its death text, unceasing.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust –
			water to heavy water, life to after-life.’ 

And from ‘Ganga, Rising’ (page 138)—

‘Here, there is no space for perfectly rounded pebbles or gentle musings – only large granite
outcrops can shackle the soul’s ferocity – a jagged fierceness – not harsh, yet quietly robust.’

And from ‘Shiuli | Harasingara’ (page 140)—

‘Soon the festivities, food,
     flowers, camaraderie,
prayer, will infuse everything –’

We are reminded in ‘Breastfeeding’ (page 150) of the social world and how that does not necessarily comply with the strictures of science, in that love is an imperfect equation, and similarly in ‘Air: Pankhā Pattachitra’ (page 151) are reminded of ‘the spare simplicity / of pure clean air.’ Not everything is lost.

Part 8, ‘Lockdown’. The writer has a natural, inborn, and after years of toil a disciplined strategy for dealing with the solitude and lack of social contact national lockdowns have imposed on the masses. It’s to be found in recourse to writing and reading, and has a distinct advantage over exploit and action in the world, its locus described in full in ‘Poetics of Solitude, Songs of Silence’ (pp162–165). But there are other pastimes more easily called upon: ‘words of grief; words of love, hate, wisdom. / Paper crafts its papyrus origins // journeying from tree to table / through clefts, wefts, contours, textures…’ (‘Paper T[r]ails’, p157). And what were the things we did in early childhood?

Part 9, ‘Epilogue’, is in the nature of a linked list, with prayer and meditation, closing with a chant and a cerement, and a rite of passage for the dying, where ‘breathing is a privilege’, ‘friends perish, the country buckles, airless’, sentiments which might seem pessimistic as a conclusion. However, one has only to remember how inexcusably reluctant governments, corporations, and we as individuals have been in meeting the challenge our post-industrial way of life has thrown at us, when at the same time there remains a volume of powerful voices denying human complicity in our current climate disaster, with the Holocene an inter-glacial period where warming is said to happen anyway, regardless of us. But even if that is so, the amount of CO2 and methane we are pumping into the atmosphere is measurable, and has reached proportions we know are not good for us, for other species, and for the planet in general. And for as long as that is the case, there is need for the poems of Anthropocene, and for their author, Sudeep Sen, who with his wide fanbase, and this latest offering, will not disappoint its members.

En passant Noted, throughout Anthropocene, is the author’s fondness for skeletal imagery, frequent reference to bronchial irritations, and the condition asthmatics endure in the drawing of breath. Noted too are life’s dramas in comparison with the operatic, ‘striation’ and its cognates a favourite word, and, unsurprisingly given the book’s subject matter, repeated reference to meteorological phenomena, weather events, cloud shapes, cloud formations, cloud breaks, layered skies, and as metaphysical embodiment errant clouds yearning for rain.


Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 19802015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury) and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann).  Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over twenty-five languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times,Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf / Random House / Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture / literature”.

The Tragedy of Mister Morn, a Play by Vladimir Nabokov

Review by Peter Cowlam

Nabokov, an aristocrat dispossessed by the October Revolution, in what is typical for him applies aesthetics rather than political discourse as filter over the coup Mister Morn has successfully repelled. The distortions of social unease are just a spectre to be poeticised over. It is Morn, who is secretly the King, who has delivered what Tremens, the revolutionary leader, could and would not – four years of peace and prosperity. That figurehead of revolt, in a breeze of world-weariness, has ensured his survival only in feigned denunciation of himself – at least as the action opens – having entered a tacit pact with the King, whoever that personage is. The sole image the people have of their monarch is masked, such as that appearing on coins of the realm. His royal presence permeates his nation through pageant and ritual, while his carriage is probably empty when out on official procession, explaining why its blinds are permanently drawn. That veil on the actuality is what facilitates the King’s other life as Morn, a man free to walk the city and judge the mood of its market squares, and know what his people think.

To Tremens – a man who deplores previous ages of revolution – that amorphous concept of ‘the people’ is all a wasted effort. History’s worst outcome has been the elevation of the common man, whose gift to the world is the debased culture a long issue of Nabokovian characters has subsequently debunked and satirised. Tremens is not motivated politically to deliver a better world. That disposes of the need the play might have to engage with revolutions, with why they occur, and with how new leaderships emerge in their aftermath. Tremens carries with him a brand of Schopenhauerian insistence on blind will, a force infusing everything, one that reduces all before it to poetic, romanticised ruin. In Ganus, a fellow-revolutionary, who has escaped exile, who is on the run, who has come to believe the revolution was a mistake, there is an absence of that true calling. Perversely nihilism has its own optimism, when Tremens adds that ‘somehow I sense…hidden within him…that spark, that scarlet comma of contamination, which will spread the wondrous cold and fire of tormenting illness across my country: deathly revolts; hollow destruction; bliss; emptiness; non-existence’ [I.1, ll 320–25].

Morn’s is not the only disguise. Ganus, in his conjectures of adultery, agrees to attend his wife Midia’s soirée, made up and costumed as Othello (Othello, consumed by jealousy and suspicion). Once there he gets himself quietly drunk in a corner, having to put up with Morn, the central guest, who shows as a force for good with a lightness of touch and a poet’s sensibility. He happens also to have infatuated Ganus’s wife, Midia, a part probably best played with chic scheming astuteness. There are other things Ganus has to tolerate. The century (the twentieth) is characterised as a northern country (like Zembla, one assumes, ‘a distant northern land’ (cp Nabokov’s Pale Fire)), a remoteness of visions, bombs, churches, golden princes, revolutionaries in raincoats, and blizzards. Ganus/Gradus suffers also the revolution’s poet, Klian, a coward ultimately, and a man locked into ancient structures, where genius cannot thrive without the eroticisation of its Muse. Other outpourings are from Dandilio, a rationalist buffoon, who has defined human happiness according to scientific theory. The tragedy of Mister Morn is his flirtation with Midia, Morn challenged to a duel when Ganus can stand it no more. In the drawing of lots to establish who will take the first shot, that etiquette is subverted by Tremens and Dandilio, who engineer matters in Ganus’s favour. The King’s bodyguard and confidant later lets him know who Morn really is, but he’s saved the bother of committing regicide when Morn elects to shoot himself. Easier to say than do. Morn, a force for life, now rues his liaison with Midia – ‘a shallow woman’, he says – then in an abrupt volte-face is prepared to sacrifice his kingdom for her. When he flees, renouncing his kingship, Tremens urges his rebels to further destruction. When Ganus thinks the King is dead, he is quiescent; when he learns he is not, he vows to kill him. By now he’s fully in the Othello role, but without make-up.

So these self-deceptions perpetuate themselves. Morn without his kingdom wastes in lassitude, conforming less and less to the cult that has given him artist status. Midia is exquisitely bored, both with him and with the rebellion, whose destruction hardly touches her consciousness. She throws him over, in favour of Edmin, the King’s confidant, a man whose presence has the air of apology. Into that debris of human relations Ganus arrives, at the point where Midia and Edmin have just eloped. He aims his pistol at Morn just as Act IV’s curtain falls.

Act V. ‘The people’, that amorphous entity above, fight back against the rebels, because it’s rumoured the King isn’t dead. Dandilio has worked out who Morn really is. Soldiers close in. Klian pleads for his life, and says he will serve the King. Tremens and Dandilio philosophise ludicrously. All ends ambiguously, with Morn declaiming the illusory nature of statecraft, then receding into the night, either to shoot himself, or end Morn’s delusion once and for all and resurrect himself as King.

Therein is also the curse of pseudo-democracies.

Written in the winter of 1923–24, The Tragedy of Mister Morn first appeared in book form in Russian in 2008. Its verse translation into English is by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan.


Peter Cowlam studied Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. He has had plays performed at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth, and by the Dartington Playgoers, and has had readings at the State University of New York and for the Theatre West 100 Plays project in Bristol, England. As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. As poet and writer of fiction his work has appeared on the Fairlight Books website, in En Bloc, The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, The Brown Boat, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Liberal, the Criterion, and others.

The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems, by Abhay K

Reviewed by Inderjeet Mani

Latin America can lay claim to some of the world’s most magnificent geographies and vital ecosystems, teeming with unique life-forms and vibrant subcultures. The area has also borne witness to vast empires and savage colonial histories, and fired the imaginations of many gifted writers and artists. In The Alphabets of Latin America, the poet-diplomat Abhay K. distils this vast multiplicity into a festival of short poems that serves as a fascinating travelogue and guidebook. Visiting the length and breadth of the region while posted in Brazil, the poet shares universal moments of yearning, sadness, insight, and transcendence. Like some of the author’s other works, the book has already been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Italian, and Malayalam.

There are gems aplenty to be found in this literary El Dorado. A poem on Borges is a brilliantly Borgesian mirror. Writing about Brazilian calabashes, the poet tenderly recalls the bottle gourds grown long ago by his mother on the thatched roof of their simple home in Bihar. A hymn to Yemanja, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea, paints a vivid picture that brings to mind a Botticellian Venus. At Iguazu Falls, the poet is drenched, dumbfounded, and silenced, at once saddened by thoughts of a dying planet and yet drawn towards that elusive union with nature. Romance and sensuality remain, thankfully, ever-present. In Brasilia, a rising moon mirrors the awakening of desire; in Medellin, lovers wandering the streets experience their romance as a supernatural event; and in Bogota, a star-crossed pair makes a tryst with destiny. At Buenos Aires’ Barolo Palace, whose design mirrors the cosmology of the Divine Comedy, the poet ascends to paradise in the company of a Beatrice who reminds him of what is truly important.

The longer poem Carnival: Prufrock at the Carnival in Rio sparkles with energy and wit, the strictures of individual anxiety and alienation that mark T. S. Eliot’s dry original dissolved by the fizzing ecstasy of samba dancing and revelry:

No, I am not Ram or Buddha, nor was meant to be
I am a flirtatious lord, one that will see
a samba queen dance, in her full spree

Whether the subject is the city of Santiago or the work of Frida Kahlo, haikus are to be found leaping like flying fish from the page. I enjoyed some of the lighthearted surrealistic tableaus, including this postcard-like picture of Brasilia:

Brasilia is a string of shining pearls at night

Brasilia is an exotic Turkish delight
Brasilia is a coiled serpent ready to bite

Among the Latin American writers who take their places on Abhay’s stage are Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Castro Alves, Jorge Amado, Lispector, Mistral, Neruda, Fuentes, Paz, and Vallejo, their collective presence a marvelous invitation to the reader to further explore their work and that of others mentioned in the book. Building such bridges between cultures must be instinctual for a diplomat, and this work dutifully celebrates the ties between Latin America and India. The Ambassador Abhay remembers Victoria Ocampo, who was Tagore’s great muse, and imagines himself as Cecilia Meireles, whose poetry was deeply influenced by both Tagore and Gandhi. In bringing these two civilizations together, the poet merges their landforms, letting the waters of the Ganga and Urubamba mingle and allowing the Andes to serve as the setting for the Hindu myth of the Churning of the Ocean (Samudra Manthan). The poet here becomes a shape-shifting shaman, soaring over the Andean peaks and seeking mummy-hood and reincarnation into a hummingbird or condor. Figures and themes from one culture are transplanted into the other; at the Mayan citadel of Tikal, he is reminded of the Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, imagining a Mayan Buddha meditating under a local equivalent of the peepul tree.

Though the poems are often panoramic, the images sometimes fail to cohere together, due in part to the limited use of figurative language. Certain poems may also have benefited from greater syntactic variation and experimentation. These, however, are small failings given the overall impact. And light as the verse often is, the poems do not shy away from darker passages of the region’s history. The events of the duplicitous capture of the last Inca emperor Atahualpa and his final garroting are narrated by the victim himself, in keeping with the traditions of magical realism.

The extreme brutality of Latin America’s political past and the continued instability of the globalized present make one wonder about the poet-diplomat’s stance towards history and time itself. In his response to one of Ruben Dario’s most melancholy poems, Abhay proposes a hopeful humanism:

Man is happy for he is alive
like a Quetzal full of colors—flying
no greater joy than to live and thrive
no deeper despair than dying
to be, to know, to find one’s way
the bliss of having lived and to hope
that tomorrow will be better than today

In a commentary on the ‘dancing stones’ of Macchu Picchu, where the mortar-free stone masonry quietly settles back into place after earthquakes, Abhay offers this succinct advice:

those who dance, endure and stay
those who don’t, are blown away.



Inderjeet Mani (@InderjeetMani) studied fiction with Carlos Fuentes and has had a long personal involvement with the literature of Latin America. A former professor and scientist from the US, he is now a fulltime writer living on the Gulf of Thailand. Mani has authored two novels Toxic Spirits (2019) and The Conquest of Kailash (forthcoming), tpgether with many other titles from Oxford, Nebraska, MIT, and elsewhere, as well as shorter literary and scientific works.

Abhay K is an Indian poet-diplomat and India’s twenty-first Ambassador to Madagascar and Ambassador to Comoros. He has previously served in diplomatic capacities in Russia, Nepal and Brazil. His published collections of poetry include Monsoon, The Magic of Madagascar, The Prophecy of Brasilia, The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu, and The Seduction of Delhi. Books he has edited include CAPITALS, 100 Great Indian Poems, 100 More Great Indian Poems, New Brazilian Poems, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems, and The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems.

Nothing Stays Put, by Harry Greenberg

Nothing Stays Put

The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes – a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom – 
for sale in the supermarket! We are in 
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics – 
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labour?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
dispensed on the sidewalks; freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor’ s buttons. But it isn’t the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it’s

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother’s garden: a prairie childhood
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed, and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above –
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood. Nothing stays put. 
The world is a wheel. All that we know…that we’re made of…is motion.

Harry Greenberg was a counsellor to victims of torture, and spent many of his latter years writing and publishing stories, articles and witty asides on Jewish life and upbringing. His Letters to Kafka is published by CentreHouse Press and is available at Amazon Kindle and on most other ebook platforms. There are plans to publish more from Harry’ s backlist.

Six Poems by Peter Adair

London, 1983

O I had a future. 


Patrick Kavanagh

Once there was a bedsit the size of a coffin.
Once there was a man pounding out on his typewriter
short stories that never made the classic Irish canon.
The inmates twist and turn on their celibate beds.
Each avoids the other, scuttling up and down the stairs,
apprentices in loneliness. Once, at midnight, the Irish labourer
yells ‘I too am a human.’ The rest is silence.
Black-clad Hasidic Jews pass by, inscrutable, aloof.
On summer nights a chanted prayer wails from a nearby house:
a lament for the ghettoes, the pogroms, the gas chambers.
The IRA is blowing up Harrods, troopers and horses,
dividing heads and limbs from bodies to unite an island.
The dole queues groan across the country.
The city boys flaunt their jags and bling,
for this is Thatcher’s champagne paradise.
With grandiloquent futility Michael Foot orates
(MPs can still orate) and waves his stick at evil
Tories. He’s sure to be the next PM, wild-haired
outside No 10, inaugurator of world peace.
Once there was a bedsit on Forberg Road, Hackney.
Once there was a man, existing on the dole as writers
and artists do. O he had a future, a future,
though Ted Hughes never did call round for tea.

The Non-Activist

lies in his bed
on the roof
while the rain
soaks his sheets 
and bones,
too dozy
to wave a hand,
going with 
the non-flow
as shouters,
mouthers of prayers
strut past
with white flags,
black flags,
a bash of Lambeg
drums, Kalashnikovs,
a million pounding 
feet and, at the back,
with a last 
puzzled look,
the severed heads.


Dear Editors

Thanks so much. I was delighted to get
the rejection slip, you so-called editors
of The Poetry Rag with its – how many? – 
twenty readers. I miss not sharing a page
with Zara, Geoff, that squiggle of Creative 
Writing MAs, verse-from-prose begetters.

I was gripped by all those poems about poems,
paintings, films, Jim’s trip through Crete.
A standout, a classic, was Simon’s ludic
Ode to Nietzsche and His ipod. 
Ah, John Donne on speed. Or has old Simon
gone right up his cyber bum?

I loved the cover – that daub of vomit
splashed on by a five-year-old Pollock.
As for the print, still using toilet paper
to absorb the bardic flow of words?
NB erratum, page 13, where Amanda
dondels her bairn. Was she throttling it?

I was thrilled to catch up with Zowie’s
biog, still puffing her piddling pamphlet
from the Self Love Press. Her mum, her dad,
her friends will treasure the hallowed copies
she thrust upon them (oh ye happy captive readers).
Well, Zowie, who needs the sales of Bowie?

The Makers are unmade. The Muse has fired
her hordes of scribblers, but wreathed her few,
her precious few. Who needs your filthy rag? 
On finest vellum, in a deluxe edition,
I’ll publish myself. So thanks, dear editors. 
You tend your cabbages. I’ll grow my roses.


Stacker

if I bit if I ate				
					her face would taste sour
at aisle seven			
					she bends lifts
stacks shelves	
					Bono is power-cycling
in Central Park		
					Sunblest Hovis leaves
flutter from trees
					philanthropic crumbs swirl
through Tesco’s granary	
					I sniff multi-seeded swill

she throws her bread		
					on water hurls it
at Osbert and Orca
					stuffs the mealy-mouthed
her sole companion	
					a shaky girl
labelled ‘Dunce’
					marched out
in front of the class
					a BA (Hons) graduate
stoops and stacks	
					he’s read the classics bends to Fate

her woe knows no best-by date
					her hands no rest
she sweats at the oven
					bakes a feast
she’ll never eat		
					tin soldiers brass bands
lick the Leader’s arse	
					her watch is running fast
to paradise
					the silver wheaten falls about me
Ceres God bless thee
					fills my trolley

I reach for the soft rolls
					she raises
a pyramid of loaves
					crashing through girders
the overseer sees off
					his catch of slaves
a peasant slips and flies
					a loose cathedral rafter
the first will be last
					the losers will win
I place a tin of tuna
					in the food bank bin


Unfinished, at a Day Centre

This morning I am all fingers and thumbs
gripping the saw, pressing the wood
tight on the block. Steadying my arm,
I cut as straight as I can – once I was
skelped for hacking the lawn’s edge
with a hoe. You silly eejit, she said.
But you pat me on the back when I fumble
to shape the base of this bird box I must
make. You’re on a roll. You’ll get the knack.

When I rest, you chunter on about the news.
They say it came from a bat…I hardly hear you,
for my robin – my slip of a robin – flits to a twig 
and sings, sings to the sun, a feathery glint 
in my eye. And though my muscles ache
I scrape steel notes on rusty strings
till, breathless, I snip the last sliver and the wood
dunts on the ground: on one day, at least, one thing
falls into place. It will be easier next time.

Finished for now, I slump into the chair, settle
like the sawdust that someone will unsettle
and sweep away while my robin – my poor robin –
warms her eggs that will never crack open. 


Best Before 

He hardly sees 
the shelves,
lifts cans,
instant meals.

Lunch: 
burnt toast.
Cries stick 
in his throat.

He swallows
anything.
An old tin
rusted on a shelf.

He would spill
tight-lipped words
like the slop
he’s slipping on.

Doesn’t fret
at the sluggish checkout.
The click of the till
flames hymns.

Fumbling, he forgets
to lift his change.
Aged ten years,
gentler,

he sucks dry
this bittersweet.



Peter Adair’s poems have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Boyne Berries, A New Ulster and other journals.  He has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. A poem is included in Eyewear’s The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021. An e-pamphlet Calling Card is available from Rancid Idol Productions and Amazon. He worked at a number of jobs, from labouring to bookselling. He lives in Bangor, Co Down.

Three poems by Dominic Fisher

We are pleased to publish three poems from Dominic Fisher’s latest collection of poems, A Customised Selection of Fireworks, available from Shoestring Press later this month (May 2022).

A Customised Selection of Fireworks

It’s the sequence that really matters 
	colour rhythm flow
which isn’t something the lay person 
gets right every time.

Maybe start with deep frozen sparklers  
	some St Anthony’s fire
a few howling spiders, remembering
	odd numbers work best.

So, scotch bonnet, popcorn bombette
	high hats, puff adder
jammy dodgers, some gamboge, and 
	a titanium salute.

Next one or two long-range screamers
	a tequilla sunrise
some bloody cranesbill followed by 
a fat green mamba.

Nearly there now with a gentle brocade
	three knee crackers
a will-o-the-whip then the coup de grâce
	a haemo-goblin.

Excellent. Would you like the receipt? 
 Take care with my children.
Please light them only in darkness
	and enjoy the show. 
Inside
Shepton Mallet Prison, National Poetry Day 2019 

The word and the law
a hand and the blame
the logic of locks
and meanings of keys
all come to the same.
Inside is this side
outside is not.

Venus or Mars or a plane
a gull in the last of day
these are no more
than pictures on walls.
Someone is shouting
on another floor.
Footsteps go down to the hall.

You can consider 
how the world divides
or what freedoms could be
inside the inside
but you come to a door
locked on the side you don’t see
when they put you inside.
Under Arcturus

Day has come inside the walls,
dogs two doors down  
are loafing on a savaged lawn.
I came out here to see
higher miles clarify 
then monster gates of fire
but find I’m watching 
moths and bathroom windows  
orbiting a tree.

Now though, Arcturus
is over us. Shaded petals go
ultraviolet, are half ghost
as night-cats step across
ponds of yellow lamplight 
to tap our books our brains,
as soundless counterpoint
sends a two-halved moon
arcing through the leaves.

And now in the emptied air 
cities are burning out among
unseen towns, depleted stars.
The dogs get whistled in.
An ambulance flies 
howling through the sky. 
A down-the-middle moon
shivers in its half house
underneath our tree.

Dominic Fisher taught English language for many years, first in Turkey and Spain, and then in the UK in Bristol. His poems, now his main preoccupation, have been successful in major competitions and have been widely published and broadcast. He is a co-editor of Raceme magazine, and regularly gives readings, both in his own right and as a member of poetry performance group the IsamBards. This, his second collection, is his first published by Shoestring Press. His previous collection is The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Dead] (Blue Nib, 2019).


“From the precise re-membering of ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Indoor Fireworks’, through the extraordinary beauty of ‘Walking Through a Half Open Book,’ to the genius of a culinary-minded Captain Hook swapping his prosthesis for a meringue-whisk, Dominic Fisher walks the high-wire of poetry, balancing surrealism with intense observation and an always erudite and playful love of words.”

—Deborah Harvey


“This poem [Dominic Fisher’s winning entry for the Bristol Poetry Prize 2018] I put on my ‘read again’ pile four times, knowing I couldn’t consume it all at one sitting – which is ultimately, I think, what I want from a poem.”

—Helen Ivory


“This is an outstanding collection [The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Dead] by a writer with a distinct, compelling voice. Fisher is clearly fascinated by how opposites are really so close to each other: the living and the dead, work and play, the rural and the urban, the ordinary everyday and the complex.”

—Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism, University of Lincoln

The Best Asian Poetry 2021–22 (editor Sudeep Sen)

review by Peter Cowlam

Kitaab International is a Singapore-based publishing house, whose open call through various media outlets across the world, when the anthology was planned, resulted in 1,500 pages of poetry sent in by almost 500 poets. As commissioning editor, Sudeep Sen invited further writers from across ‘AustralAsia’ to send their work to him direct – authors he describes as ‘senior poets who might not have seen the open competitive call’.

The overall outcome is an anthology of highly able poets from a vast geographical region, encompassing India, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Israel, Nepal, Malaysia, Turkey, Sikkim, Pakistan, South Korea, Japan, China, Viêtnam, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, with writers represented also based in the USA, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. With all poems of the anthology presented largely in English, it’s fair to assume its target audience belongs in the wider anglosphere, which reminds us of a remark made by the Argentine writer J. L. Borges, who in a series of lectures, which were gathered together and published in the 1980s, tells us that a major event in the history of the West was its discovery of the East, a discovery no less significant for its continuing consciousness of the East.

Apart from poems originally written in English, there are translations from a range of other languages: Farsi and Japanese, Turkish and Bhasa, Hebrew and Chinese, Urdu and Korean, Hindi and Afghani, among others. Included, as the editor tells us is often the case when talking of literatures from the Asian region, are Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and others, with the geo-cultural locus of ‘Australasia’ an inextricable link. Sudeep Sen adds to that Borges observation above a contemporary perspective. His is a description of the ‘idea of Asia’ as ‘hugely complex and diverse, its languages multifarious, its geographical stretch enormous’, and its ‘boundaries linguistically elastic’. He goes on—

‘Over the year-long process of reading widely and putting this anthology together, I have learnt so much more about the cultural expanse of the Asian continent – its ancient and modern traditions, that coexist and flourish concurrently – discovering hidden gems that were not otherwise apparent in the standard run-of-the-mill academic/trade anthologies. Individual poets shared their personal insights and knowledge with me so that I could explore their regions and literatures more deeply. It was like landing in a foreign country, where you have enough knowledge to navigate intelligently, but would never stumble upon the obscure alleyways if the locals did not point them out to you and lead you there.’ 

What the anthology adds up to is a richness in poetic voices, whose subject matter ranges over the whole of human situatedness. There are poems of testimony based on personal observation, of the visual and sonic effect of the words and structure of the poems themselves (image, rhythm, meter, etc.), there are minimalist poems, figurative poems, poems laid out on the page such that the concrete arrangement of text and white space is part of what the poem expresses, there is serious comment on socio-historical imperatives, there is satire, there are poems of war, of a world in contextual change, of family history, of psychological conflict, of the politics of Empire, there are feminist poems, and there are poems steeped in the intricacies of the linguistic art itself – and much, much more.

All in all, it’s a remarkable offering from the publisher, the editor, and the book’s 130 contributors.


Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 19802015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury) and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann). Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over twenty-five languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf / Random House / Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for ‘outstanding persons in the field of culture / literature’.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE AS THE INTIMATE ‘OTHER’

SUDEEP SEN

1.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
haiku triptych

ERASURE

  • lines of poems
  • scratched out, erased to ink in —
  • new shapes — art revealed

SELF-PORTRAIT

  • gouache shade’s matt-blur —
  • an outline of the psyche —
  • subtle peek into soul’s eye

SONG

  • rabindra sangeet’s
  • nasal baritone — honey-
  • tinged, monotonic

— Sudeep Sen

My emotional and aural response to Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry was slow in coming — especially his own English translations of the 1913 Nobel prize-winning Gitanjali/Song Offerings — in spite of being buoyed by a glowing introduction by W. B. Yeats, a poet whose pitch-perfect and sometimes sardonic English poetry I quietly admired. Tagore’s nectar-dripping ‘o’er-floweth-the-cup’ nasal-lyrical style, seemed incongruous and anachronistic and uncool (albeit perhaps misplaced), especially growing up in the cosmopolitan 1970s and 80s.

Intellectually however, I was always keenly engaged with Tagore’s wider art — in particular his wide-ranging master-skills in the fine arts, theatre, dance-drama, and short fiction. I was specifically attracted to his ‘erasures’, the wonderful way he made unique artworks out of erasing and inking-out sections and elements from his poems’ working-drafts as part of his overall editing and image-making process. It is said that “Tagore — who likely exhibited protanopia (colour blindness), or partial lack of (red-green, in Tagore’s case) colour discernment — painted in a style characterised by peculiarities in aesthetics and colouring schemes”. His sketches, pen & inks, oils, watercolours, and gouaches of a certain period — and even more significantly, works by Tagore’s other relatives such as Girindranath, Gaganendranath and Abanindranath — deeply interested and inspired me.

Of course, Rabindranath’s songs and dance-dramas were omnipresent during the yearly Durga Puja cultural programmes and other festivals in my city and elsewhere. Actually, a certain kind of Bengali does not need any excuse or occasion to stage Tagore’s works — and I was surrounded by many of them. And surrounded by a lot of Tagore paraphernalia too — beautiful editions of Rabindra Rachanabali and Gitabitan on my parents’ bookshelves, his official sage-like sepia-photograph modestly-framed in wood, his artworks and reproductions on their walls, and stacks and stacks of Rabindra Sangeet EPs, LPs, and audio cassettes by some of the finest exponents of this field. But my prized possession always remains the original ‘erasure’ tear-sheet from one of his workbooks, framed within double-glass panels on my library wall. My mother, in her younger days, was an active dancer-actress in many Tagore productions. As children, we learnt many of his Bengali verses by heart for recitation competitions.

One of Tagore’s ‘Erasures’

So growing up in a Bengali family in metropolitan Delhi in the leafy neighbourhood of Chittaranjan Park’s probashi-Bangla diasporic topography, one could not possibly avoid Tagore. He was everywhere — his music; his poetry; local shops and houses bearing his stamp, symbol, nomenclature and even his name; his sculptures emblazoned in the form of bronze busts; his demi-god-like status; and more. As a child, I had the task of fetching milk from Mother Dairy every evening. And as I walked past the houses in my neighbourhood carrying my large aluminium pail almost grazing the tarmac, sonorous sounds of children practising Rabindra Sangeet and their footsteps learning Tagore’s folk-dance were audible. At the time of course I didn’t think much of all that beyond the fact that they were part of an everyday ritual. Of those days, I have sometimes provocatively and irreverently said, Tagore was pouring out of every orifice. This was often not appreciated by hardcore Bengalis who, perhaps missing the irony, sought to misguidedly reprimand me. All this was in my childhood, young adulthood, and possibly a little beyond that. At that age, I suppose as a fashionable act of adolescent rebellion, I perhaps even shunned Tagore. But what is obvious, especially now as a practising poet/literary editor/critic/translator, how much Bengali culture — and by its curious extension, also Tagore — subtly influenced me through the process of cultural osmosis in the received environment in which I was growing up in.

This is not to say that the other languages, literatures, political ideas and philosophies weren’t discussed in my home and amongst my grandparents, parents, friends, and their circles. They variously infected and informed me as well — and I am grateful for that. Also, I grew up with three mother-tongues — Bangla, Hindi and English — like many other Indians of my generation who are at least trilingual or more. So my loyalties were not necessarily monolithically fixed to the idea of Bengaliness, albeit a very important and significant strand in my tissue-system.

I was always a devout admirer of Jibanananda Das and Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poetry over and above Tagore’s; and admitting that was almost sacrilegious. I found their precise tactility, un-Victorian-Augustan phrase-making, use of contemporary idiom, the power of their oral structure, and in general, the best aspects of Modernism, much more appealing at the time. But equally, I also loved and worshipped Milton and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Ghalib and Faiz, Neruda and Paz, VerlaineBaudelaireRimbaud-Celan. In fact, when I think of the past, the list seems precociously expansive though delightfully centrifugal.

2.

To reiterate, Tagore as a cerebral idea and its efferent discourse was always present in the milieu in which I spent my boyhood days — so he must have at least partially influenced me, whether or not I consciously acknowledged or rejected it at that time or even later. Furthermore, my five years living and writing in Bangladesh, in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, significantly enhanced my latent appreciation for Rabindranath. There I encountered Tagore as an everyday cultural idea, a living metaphor — unpretentious, earthy, and accessible.

It was such a pleasure to wake up in Dhaka and spend the entire day not having to utter a single word of English or Hindi, and only be immersed in the linguistic cadence and rhythms of Bangla. English as a tongue — except for the limited rarefied upper class — was almost entirely irrelevant and redundant, and thankfully so. In Bangladesh, I found renewed admiration and love for Tagore’s music and poetry, largely through hearing his songs sung and his poetry recited by highly-skilled and established singers and actors. Tagore’s discourse was aplenty too, as were those of other writers and artists of the two Bengals and beyond.

While in Dhaka, I translated three full-length books of selected poems by three Bangladeshi poets, wrote and choreographed a large-format literary coffee-table book titled Postcards from Bangladesh, edited The British Council Book of Emerging English Poets from Bangladesh, co-founded/co-edited Six Seasons Review, wrote several critical introductions and blurbs for books by local authors, and the Bengali editions of my own books — Rain/Barsha, and A Blank Letter/Ekti Khali Chithi were also published there.

I closely worked with Bengali poets, writers, academic, singers, artists, actors and lovers of Bengali culture, including of course Tagore’s. So my mature engagement with the Bengali language, literature and culture, including my new-found appreciation for Rabindranath was carried back to my home city of Delhi — completing a lovely unexpected arc. This osmotic presence of Tagore as the intimate ‘other’ — quite unbeknown to me — took root in its translucent avatar, widening the tonal registers of my poetic scales. In the slow-churning growth in my own artistic practice from analogue to digital, from vinyl to CD, from mono to stereo to 5.1 and 7.1, I am quite sure upon reflection that Tagore played his subtle part, sonically and textually.

To further illustrate the context of my early upbringing, background, and where Tagore — then and now — fits in my life as a writer and an artist, let me quote part of the introduction from my fledgeling book of poems, Leaning Against the Lamp-Post, that was first published as a limited edition in 1983 in New Delhi, and then later in 1996 in the USA by Triad/University of South Carolina:


“The poems in [the] collection Leaning Against the Lamp-Post, were all written between 1980 and 1985, while I was still in high school and subsequently an undergraduate in New Delhi. In 1983, relying on my incipient enthusiasm, I summoned up all my courage, typed out about fifty poems from a much larger batch I had written up until then, and with the aid of a modest donation from my grandfather, took it to a local printer. They were cyclostyled through one of those now-extinct, messy, gargantuan machines (photocopying was still quite expensive then) and hand-sewn at a bindery by an old man who until then had only bound thousands of legal manuals and commercial reports with ubiquitous red cloth or leather spines and with the titles stamped in gold. This was however the first time he had bound a collection of poetry, and he did it with genuine interest and with the care of a fine craftsman. He was a poet himself, and wrote and recited in Urdu. He also knew Bengali (my ‘official’ mother tongue) fluently, having spent his early life in what is now known as Bangladesh. Perhaps it was propitious that my early poems were blessed by the tactile touch of a true poet. It would only be fair to say of my grandfather that his patronage made him my first publisher. And as it turns out, this limited hand-assembled first edition of poems was to be my first ‘unofficial’ book of verse.


I was always convinced that writing poetry was extremely difficult (even though I thoroughly enjoyed reading it), and was best left to the masters themselves. Then one day in 1980 (I was in Class 10 at the time), daydreaming through a boring lesson in school, I penned, quite unknowingly, in perfect rhyme and metre, my first poem. Then followed those first few years when I wrote sheaves and sheaves of, what sometimes seem embarrassingly callow, and sometimes naive poems. But then, looking back I feel that there was a sense of innocence, idealism, seriousness, and honesty about them.


I grew up in a liberal and educated family with a lot of poetry and music around me. Art, literature, philosophy, and the world of ideas in particular, had always been a part of my upbringing. I learnt that our forefathers belonged to the aristocracy and could be traced back to the enlightened Raja Raj Ballabh Rai, famous in the margins of Indian history during the times of Sirajudaullah, the Nawab of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. As a child, my mother and grandmother would recite children’s verse and sing songs for me. I realise now that much of my interest in form, structure, sound pattern and rhyme scheme comes from hearing aloud the incantatory music of their prayers and songs, which I had obviously internalised over the years.


My parents and grandparents introduced me to the world of poetry. They would recite the great Bengali poets: Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and Kazi Nazrul Islam; also Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics and the Victorians. I came to learn many of them by heart. In school and college, I explored Hindi and Urdu poetry, discovered the Russians, Latin Americans, as well as Japanese and Chinese verse. Some of my favourite poets included Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Irina Ratushinskaya, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Basho, Li Bai, and many more. My mesho [uncle] — through the now out-of-print precious Penguin Modern European Poets volumes edited by Al Alvares — opened to me a wondrous window, a hitherto unsighted world of modern European poets: Vasko Popa, Guillaume Apollinaire, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, and so many others. Also the Metaphysical Poets and the French Symbolists, in particular Donne, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Verlaine, fascinated me. Of course, growing up in the seventies, one could not miss Ezra Pound and T S Eliot. The congregation grew and grew, and through quiet osmosis, I was seduced into the world of sound, rhythm, word-patterns, ideas, syllabics, music, and language itself ….”

The direct influence of Tagore on my own work — however oblique and subtle — can be best seen in my two books Rain and Postcards from Bangladesh. Rain is landscaped in the two Bengals — West Bengal and Bangladesh — contains an evocative series of prose poems structured in three mock-sonnet sections, The First Octet, The Second Octet and The Only Sestet. Setting up the tone in the prologue that acts as an alaap [introduction], the volume importantly opens with a quote from Tagore:

  • In the lap of the storm clouds — the rain comes —
  • Its hair loosened, its sari borders flying!

Postcards from Bangladesh by virtue of its content contains many resonances of Rabindranath — among others, a piece on Tagore’s house Shilaidaha Kuthibari in Kushtia on the banks of the River Gorai. Here, he stayed many days at a time composing poetry and songs and writing his novel, Gora.

In my multi-media piece, Wo|Man: Desire, Divinity, Denouement, that blends poetry, prose, drama, dance and live music, Rabindra Sangeet has been used in the live stage production versions, sung variously by Vidya Rao, Jayati Ghosh and Averee Chaurey, as part of the India International Centre Festival of the Arts, and at The Attic in New Delhi.

More recently, I was commissioned to write specific poems, new English poetry in Tagore’s own voice for his marvellous Bhanushinger Padavali dance-drama stage production. The Kolkata and New Delhi productions were directed by the leading exponent, danseuse Padmashree Bharati Shivaji, Vijayalakshmi, and their repertory dancers of The Centre for Mohiniyattam. Here are the production-specific Tagore poems that I wrote:

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
after Bhanushiger Padavali

ACT ONE

  1. Sudder Street, Kolkata
  • Now back from England —
  • lonely, and feeling low.
  • What a time it was, there —
  • grey and damp
  • and drenched
  • like slow-burning grief.
  • My studies left incomplete—
  • a Law degree unearned.
  • What a waste, what a waste —
  • what would people say?
  1. Jyotindranath Tagore & Kamdambini Devi
  • So what a joy it was
  • to move in with you both —
  • under your care, love and grace.
  • What happiness you gave me —
  • something you didn’t even know
  • yourselves.
  • My happiest days were here —
  • with you both.
  • But there was sadness as well —
  • sadness at seeing
  • notun bouthan pine
  • for her husband, my brother —
  • her endless wait for him
  • to return home from work.
  • During monsoon days,
  • dark and clouded —
  • empty and bereft
  • at Jyotida’s absence,
  • my notun bouthan
  • plunged in sorrow.
  • What could I do for her?
  • How could I appease her?
  • She, like Radha,
  • waited endlessly for Krishna —
  • notun bouthan and Jyotida —
  • the fair maiden and the dark god,
  • entwined
  • in life’s happy sadness.

ACT TWO

  • Oh such beautiful strains of Bhara Badar
  • Bouthan’s dirge — melancholic, depressed,
  • she loved listening to my lyrics,
  • the ones I wrote, composed, and sung for her.
  • But the moment she heard dada’s footsteps —
  • her face lit up like a young glow-worm,
  • her gloom erased by his arrival.
  • Just like Radha would smile,
  • asking her sakhis to dress her up, adorn her,
  • anticipating, preparing, to finally meet her lover.

ACT THREE

  • I still remember Sajani Sajani
  • After very very long, Jyotida is back home.
  • He waits for bouthan to arrive, to join him.
  • What would he be thinking, wanting, desiring?
  • Was it about her graceful gait,
  • her raven-black braided hair,
  • or her elegant beauty?
  • Or was it Mohini — the enchantress.
  • A dream to dance to.
  • Was it not like Abhisarika Radha
  • on her way to see her lover.
  • How happy I feel to see my dada with bouthan —
  • how joyous, and how deeply blessed.

3.

About twenty years ago, prompted by the fact that I was introducing my son Aria to the poetries and music of different cultures including Bengali, I realised that the children’s verse written by Tagore — as available in limited English translation — appeared stilted, staccato and academic. Also, the quirky-fun-witty aspects of the Tagore poems as those that appear in Khapcharra/Out of Sync were not adequately explored in those limited translations. It is first the joyful abandon and immediate emotional connect that has always attracted me to the best of poetry. It is much later after several readings of a poem that I tend to savour the poem’s subtle content, context, cadence, and craft. I found the former mostly missing in the available translations of Tagore’s children and humorous poetry that I had laid my hands upon until then.

So with the assistance of my baba [father], I started translating Rabindranath’s wonderfully illustrated volume of nonsense verse, Khapcharra. The Visva-Bharati Santiniketan hardback edition which I still possess, with its jute-coloured cover-weave, is priceless. Surprisingly, this book has not yet been fully translated — considering Tagore tends to be among the first Indian writers on the list of publishers’ translation series or academics’ priorities in the field of Translation Studies (vis-a-vis Indian literature of course). Hopefully, my now ailing father and I will be able to complete the translation of this entire book for publication in the near future.

Translating the complex rhythms and clever rhymes of the Khapcharra poems have been a particular challenge. In some cases, when I transposed the Bengali rhymes onto English, they tended to hit a flawed tonal register and sounded awkward in modern English diction. When I left out the rhymes altogether, then of course one missed out on the wicked-atonal-musicality and wit, at least to a certain extent. At the end however, I decided to dispense with the end-rhymes but kept the internal rhythms alive and reasonably true. This is because I wanted Tagore’s original Bengali poems in my translated versions to read as competent English poems, reflecting the sine-graph of the contemporary English-language idiom. I definitely did not want them to stutter and languish under the cast of a post-Victorian-Augustan shadow and its inherent dated inflections.

Here are four examples that appear in my book of translations titled Aria (India: Yeti Books, 2009 / UK: Mulfran Press, 2011). They also appear in The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, published in the USA by Harvard University Press in 2011. The Indian edition published by Visva-Bharati, appeared in 2012. However, the page numbers mentioned after each poem refer to the recent Harvard edition:

BIRD-SELLER SAYS, “THIS IS A BLACK-COLOURED CHANDA.”

  • Bird-seller says, “This is a black-coloured chanda.”
  • Panulal Haldar says, “I’m not blind —
  • It is definitely a crow — no God’s name on his beak.”
  • Bird-seller says, “Words haven’t yet blossomed —
  • So how can it utter ‘father’ ‘uncle’ in the invocation?” [page 743]

IN KANCHRAPARA

  • In Kanchrapara
  • there was a prince
  • [wrote but] no reply
  • from the princess.
  • With all the stamp expenses
  • will you sell off your kingdom?
  • Angry, disgusted
  • he shouts: “Dut-toor”
  • shoving the postman
  • onto a bulldog’s face. [page 743]

TWO EARS PIERCED

  • Two ears pierced
  • by crab’s claws.
  • Groom says: “Move them slowly,
  • the two ears.”
  • Bride sees in the mirror —
  • in Japan, in China —
  • thousands living
  • in fisher-folks colony.
  • Nowhere has it happened — in the ears,
  • such a big mishap. [page 744]

IN SCHOOL, YAWNS

  • In school, yawns
  • Motilal Nandi —
  • says, lesson doesn’t progress
  • in spite of concentration.
  • Finally one day on a horse-cart he goes —
  • tearing page by page, dispersing them in the Ganga.
  • Word-compounds move
  • float away like words-conjoined.
  • To proceed further with lessons —
  • these are his tactics. [page 744]
  • [NOTE: All four poems were originally taken from the Visva-Bharati 1937 edition of Tagore’s nonsense verse, Khapcharra (Out of Sync). They are all untitled, so I have used the first line of each poem as their symbolic title. ‘In School, Yawns’ appears on page 4, ‘In Kanchrapara’ on page 5, ‘Two Ears Pierced’ on page 10, and, ‘Bird-seller says, “This is a black-coloured chanda.” ’ on page 11.]

These translations that were initially and largely meant for my son Aria and his friends — but to my pleasant surprise and pleasure, they found a much larger appreciative resonance with other fellow poets, writers, translators, lay readers, and even strict Tagore scholars.

Ultimately, unplanned and unintended acts of love and passion such as these come about as a disguised blessing — and that for me is the heart and essence of the joys of poetry, literature, art and music. Rabindranath Tagore, the polymath, sporting a wryly-elegant askance smile, would have done so, hopefully in agreement.


SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Wendy & Tagore, Saranindranath: Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (USA: George Braziller, 2001)

Bhatnagar, R. K. & Mukhopadhyay, Amit: Drawings & Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore (India: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1987)

Bose, Aurobindo: Later Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (UK: Peter Owen, 1974 / India: Rupa, 2002)

Chakravarty, Radha & Alam, Fakrul (editors): The Essential Tagore (USA: Harvard University Press, 2011 / India: Visva-Bharati, 2012)
Chakravarty, Radha: Gora (Penguin Classics, 2009)
—– : Shesher Kobita: Farewell Song (India: Srishti, 2005)
—– : Choker Bali (India: Srishti, 2004)

Chaudhuri, Sukanta: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings for Children (OUP, 2002)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings on Literature and Language (OUP, 2001)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (OUP, 2000)

Dutta, Krishna & Robinson, Andrew: Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (UK: Picador, 1997)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Letters (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (UK: Bloomsbury, 1995)

Dyson, Ketaki Kushari: I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems (UK: Bloodaxe, 1991 / India: UBSPD, 1992)

Furrell, James W.: The Tagore Family: A Memoir (India: Rupa, 2004)

Ghose, Sisirkumar: Tagore for You (India: Visva Bharati, 1966/1984)

Haq, Kaiser, Quartet (UK: Heinemann, 1993)

Kripalini, Krishna: Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (UK: Oxford University Press, 1962 / India: Visva Bharati, 1980)

Mazumdar, Dipak: A Poet’s Death: Late Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (India: Rupa, 2004)

Radice, William: Rabindranath Tagore: The Post Office & Card Country (India: Visva Bharati, 2008)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics, 1991)
—– : Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 1985)

Rahman, Muhammad Anisur: Songs of Tagore (Dhaka: Pathak Shamabesh, 1999)

Rushd, Abu: Selected Songs of Rabindranath Tagore (Dhaka: Rabindra Charcha Kendra, 1992)

Sen, Sudeep: Aria: Translations (India: Yeti Books, 2009 / UK: Mulfran Press, 2011)
—– : The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry [editor] (HarperCollins, 2011)
—– : Atlas (UK/India), Six Season’s Review (Bangladesh) & World Literature Today (USA), ‘Tagore Poems’ (2005-2010)

Som, Reba: Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song (Viking Penguin, 2009)

Tagore, Rabindranath: Gitanjali: Song Offerings [introduction by W B Yeats] (UK: Macmillan, 1913)
—– : Rabindra Rachanabali (India: Visva Bharati)
—– : Gitabitan (India: Visva Bharati)

Thompson, Edward: Rabindranath Tagore (UK: The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry / Ernest Benn Ltd, 1925)

Winter, Joe: Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali (UK: Anvil / India: Writers Workshop, 2000)


NOTE: Earlier versions of his essay originally appeared in the Seminar magazine (No 623 / July 2011) special issue on ‘The Nation and its Poet: A Symposium on Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941 | Life, Language, Legacy’, guest edited by Ananya Vajpeyi; and in the American Book Review (Vol 36, No 6 / Sept-Oct 2015), guest-edited by Saikat Mazumdar. Some of my individual translations of the Tagore poems in this essay have earlier appeared in Aria (India: Yeti Books, 2009 / UK: Mulfran Press, 2011), The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam & Radha Chakravarty (USA: Harvard University Press, 2011 / India: Visva-Bharati Santiniketan, 2012). A Bengali translation of this essay is forthcoming in the Kolkata magazine, https://daakbangla.com/ | Copyright © Sudeep Sen, 2011, 2015, 2022.


SUDEEP SEN [www.sudeepsen.org] is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and “one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene” (BBC Radio). He is “fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language” (Scotland on Sunday). At the 2004 Struga Poetry Festival (Macedonia), he received the ‘Pleiades’ honour for having made “a significant contribution to contemporary world poetry”. His prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann UK). He has edited important anthologies: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22 (Kitaab, Singapore), and Converse: Contemporay English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann UK). Blue Nude (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Love Poems (Knopf/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. The Government of India’s Ministry of Culture has awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature”. Sen is the first Asian honoured to read his poetry and deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture at the Nobel Laureate Festival.

*

ALFREDO PÉREZ ALENCART

WPP [World Poetry/Prose Portfolio]

New Series | No. 1

ALFREDO PÉREZ ALENCART, born in Puerto Maldonado, Perú in 1962 is a Peruvian-Spanish poet and teacher at the University of Salamanca. He has published 15 books, among them, Mother Forest (2002), Hear me, my Brethren (2009), Cartography of the Revelations (2011), Paradise Mud (2019), The Sun of the Blind (2021), and Monarchy of the Astonishment (Anthology, 2013). His work has been translated into 50 languages and he has received the international poetry award, the Vicente Gerbasi Medal (2009), the Jorge Guillen poetry Award (2012), the Humberto Peregrino (2015) and the Mihail Eminescu Medal (2017).

Translated from the Spanish by Stuart Park

INVOCATION

Brother,
wherever you might be,
unclench your fists,
and may there never
be a weapon in your hands again,

may conflict
no longer be your reason
for drawing close,

may only words
arise to win the argument.

May only your words persuade,
not blows or
bullets,
and may benevolence

rise up within you

*

INVOCACIÓN

Hermano,
estés donde estés,
abre los puños
y que no vuelvan
las armas a tus manos,

que la lucha
no insista en acercar
distancias,

que solo las palabras
se levanten y convenzan.

Que convenzan tus palabras,
no los golpes ni las
balas,
y que en ti se agigante

la benevolencia.

*

EVE

You, I speak to you,
female out of male,

woman that causes
your other rib
to tremble.

You are the strength
of the world,

woman,
who waits for the night
to impregnate man
with light.

who privatized him
for your protection

and delight

*

EVA

Tú, a ti hablo
hembra del hombre,

varona que haces
temblar a
tu otra costilla.

Tú eres la fuerza
del mundo,

mujer
que aguardas la noche
para preñar de luz
al hombre

que privatizaste
para tu amparo
y deleite.

*

CREATION

No whisper
of woman
accompanied
the desiring loneliness
of my adolescent days.

No rib came out
of my clay.

Then a leaf
of exquisite fragrance fell
and in my breast became
most loving flesh,

vibrant flame,
vein of transfusion
for all time.

Then the seed
of the only-begotten
was sown.

I moisten you with my mouth,
woman,

I knead you to myself.

*

CREACIÓN

Ningún
susurro de mujer
acompañó
la deseante soledad
de mis días adolescentes.

Ninguna costilla salía
de mi barro.

Entonces cayó una hoja
de exquisita fragancia
y en mi pecho
se hizo carne amantísima,

vibrante llama,
vena de transfusión para
siempre.

Luego empezó
la fecundación del
unigénito.

Te ensalivo,
mujer,

te amaso a mí.

*

MAY IT NEVER HAPPEN TO YOU

Things will be very different
when good fortune fades away,
and, when you see their shrunken bellies,
you search for your loved-ones’ bread.

You will be like the newcomer
scavenging at the rubbish dumps
and sleeping under bridges
while bright lights shine above.

You had forgotten
the citizenry of old
that tied famine round its neck
and shackled work to servitude.

You’ll suffer unthinkable privations
to hold down paltry jobs
with excellence and care
that no native worker wants.

We all travel in the same ship
that rises and falls with the tides.
Gold is a vain ambition
for tomorrow it may all be gone.

Yes; may it never happen to you

*

OJALÁ QUE NUNCA TE SUCEDA

A ti te tocará otra suerte
cuando se aleje la bonanza
y, al mirar en su vientre seco,
querrás ir tras el pan para los tuyos.

Serás como el recién llegado
que busca comida en la basura
y debe dormir bajo los puentes
mientras todo brilla por arriba.

Tú habías perdido la memoria
de esa pasada ciudadanía
que ataba las hambres a su cuello
y el trabajo a la servidumbre.

Pasarás desmedidas privaciones
para lograr empleos miserables
que los nativos del lugar no desean
y tú harás con puntual esmero.

Todos viajamos en un mismo barco
que sube y baja con la marea.
Por el oro nunca te envanezcas
pues bien puede faltar mañana.

Sí: ojalá que nunca te suceda.

*

FOR AFTERWARDS

When I am no more,
And no longer see you, deeply
moved,
for my soul has gone from me,

do not weep
for yesterday when
I went up
or down.

Divide the ashes
into two parts.

Then scatter them
over the rivers that coursed
through my heart.

And bid me farewell
with a psalm by the one
who vanquished Goliath.

And thus will I
open the darkened window
as my soul reclines
against an olive tree

from Gethsemane

*

PARA DESPUÉS

Cuando ya no esté
ni emocionado pueda verlos
porque mi alma salió,

no lloren
por el ayer que fui
hacia arriba o hacia
abajo.

Dos partes hagan
de las cenizas.

Aviéntenlas luego
a los ríos que me surcaron
el corazón.

Y díganme adiós
con un salmo de aquel
que venció a Goliat.

Así abriré la ventana ciega
con mi alma recostada
en un olivo

de Getsemaní.


Ars Notoria’s International Prose and Poetry editor, Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980–2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury) and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann). Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over twenty-five languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf / Random House / Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture / literature”.

David Rushmer’s theatre of poetry

Yogesh Patel

When I discovered David Rushmer’s uncluttered poetry with distilled expressions in the mould of neo-impressionism in Remains to Be Seen published by Shearsman Books, I was thrilled but wondered if such European style of abstract poetry would be appreciated at all in England. Chhāyāvād in Hindi is akin to such writing, and even the translation of such poetry is not acceptable in the West. Artist and poet Meena Chopra springs to mind. However, Rushmer goes further with fragmented text to explore the space the layout occupies on a page in the graphical correlation of its elements.

A normal style that prevails around us in poetry is very insistent on forms, syntax, and ambiguity through metaphors. Most editors and publishers have no time for poems that do not conform to such demands. Rushmer takes risks, experiments and deploys fragmented text that hangs on a page as if it is a theatre, as you would see below in a screen capture of the pages from his pamphlet. Auden bluntly called the English poets ‘warbling their woodnote in the wild.’ He refers to the preserve of very English aspects of poetry and lack of any appetite for experiments. Also, his observation was about English poets ignoring anything European!

Therefore, I was quite amused by the English writers loud in declaring themselves Europeans during the debates around leaving the EU, while ignoring trends, debates and developments in European literature. That is where a new generation of poets trying to crossover to other genres brings freshness. When I introduced a new form, The Rapids, one of the typical editors entrenched in the closeted views told me to ‘stick to traditional forms’, adding ‘it is what young poets will do’! I could not decide if I had to be flattered that I had a set of mind for ‘young people’. Snubs and snobbery stemming from the exigencies for structural language and only traditional aspects of poetry are sad because they block the alternative possibilities and enlightenment in the art of poetry that can bring a refreshed experience. The notion propagating from workshops and MFA courses is that poetry is somehow a craft that can put something together from the list given to students or is a science that can explain everything that is poetry! The product that emerges from such discipline out of the universities, workshops or classes demands the herding of poetry in certain confines to define it for our age. Conformity to syntax, poetic forms or scansion–though should be observed-is not where a poem should begin in any way so that it is the best construct for these poets, editors and publishers, not forgetting the judges of the poetry prizes.

Poems should start with ideas, vision, sentiments, something abstract in our life that we need to explore to make some sense of it, multiple layers of meaning, and many other subtle aspects. The forms and scaffolding of poetry can come into play later.

Poems should start with ideas, vision, sentiments, something abstract in our life that we need to explore to make some sense of it, multiple layers of meaning, and many other subtle aspects. The forms and scaffolding of poetry can come into play later. However, they also should be ready to disintegrate into something raw for us to reconstruct and allow an expression in a novel way. A leap of imagination and sentiments also can lead us here. I will be surprised if the craftsmen of poetry are unaware that English grammar is not any cast-iron proposal. Different style guides and rules always recommend diverse rules. In contrast, many other world languages have stricter rules and syntax. The freedom in English can be an asset that others don’t have, and can allow us greater adventures with the flexibility that is handed to us! But are we honestly ready to entertain such possibilities? Poets are best placed to be inventive, philosophical and unusually expressive. Lamentably, fragmented language, co-relation to images and conflicting metaphors, with many other artistic freedoms, are not in critics’ favour or any popular trending to allow them extra freedom mentioned!

Poets like Rushmer are not about challenging or upsetting the status quo, but wish that there was also space for their exciting works in the flow of contemporary poetry. Recently, on his creative adventure, he had to find an American publisher for his limited edition of a radical pamphlet. The Empty Centre requires visual engagement from the readers. It is a theatre of impressionism in language with modernism at play with it. A lot goes on in these poems without a structured language. Poems dabble into visual elements.

A long time ago, Eugène Guillevic gave us Euclidiennes to challenge our engagement with life with geometric shapes speaking as poems. That is very European work that no British poet ‘warbling their woodnote in the wild’ would attempt. But Rushmer is after new ways. He has a taste for unusual music and, just as with its odd sounds and melodies; he tries to create meanings from the broken text in poetry. These poems also cross over to graphics and demand not only the intense attention and intellect of readers but trigger a wholly novel experience in understanding the language that wants to rebel and is presented to us in a visual form as a theatrical interaction, not as the language we know.

In his pamphlet, Rushmer has created pages with a blank rectangle sitting in the centre of a page. This defined central space keeps us anchored to nothingness so we can make a journey from them outwards to what his language and words create for us to understand and experience. Hence, the centre is offset by the words and phrases, and sometimes images emerge, with some occupying both spaces.

Not all experiments may work, but literature should be daring, free from the hands of academics or those who are closed to any other ideas than theirs. Progress comes from changes and experiments; some of them will be a success, some a failure. Publishers like Prototype are trying to address this ethos. Hence, one can still hold hope that there will be a place for innovations in English poetry. Let us take a risk with literary forms, syntax, and see their crossovers to other genres.

The art of experiments shouldn’t be treated as tomfoolery.

 Ref

The Empty Space, David Rushmer, Aphonic Space limited editions AS005

Tahrir and the Poetry of Witness

The Utopians of Tahrir Square: Dr. Anba Jawi and Catherine Temma Davidson

Introduction by Catherine Davidson

The Utopians of Tahrir Square contains poems from 28 young Iraqi poets whose work responds to the protests for human rights that took over Baghdad’s Tahrir (Freedom) Square in 2019. Bringing these poems to life in English was the product of a long collaboration that began on a rainy night in London, during the height of the protests. Anba Jawi, a writer from Iraq who was a regular member of our poetry class at Exiled Writers Ink, came to the group with a heavy sadness. Eyes red, missing sleep, she had been following the protests on Facebook night after night, full of  frustration and grief.


Anba Jawi

Youthful protesters had been gathering by their thousands, setting up barricades and taking over a disused parking structure they called the Turkish Restaurant, after a real restaurant that had once been housed at the top. They were standing up against the sectarianism, corruption and cronyism that had infected Iraqi politics in the wake of the American invasion. They called themselves the generation of the 2000’s. They had transformed an urban desert into a kind of vibrant, protest festival, with lectures, music, dance, painting, song – and poetry.

So many of them are poets, Anba told me. And they’re killing them.

This is what had been keeping her awake. Security forces surrounding the protests had responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Hundreds of protesters had been killed, and thousands more injured.

Anba Jawi, a writer from Iraq who was a regular member of our poetry class at Exiled Writers Ink, came to the group with a heavy sadness. Eyes red, missing sleep

I asked Anba whether she would consider translating and sharing some of the poems. She said yes, and asked if I would help. Our project led first to a live reading in December 2019, connected by video to Tahrir Square and broadcast via Facebook to more than 1000 people around the world, and ended this month with an English language collection published by Palewell Press, drawn largely and with permission from an anthology published in Iraq.


Tahrir Square Iraq, So many of them are poets, Anba told me. And they’re killing them. photo by Ziyad Matti

The poets range from well-known and established writers, some of whom published multiple books, to those just starting out – putting together their first collections or having only begun to publish on-line. Their poems bear witness to a unique moment in Iraqi history, when an uprising for human rights nearly transformed a country, and almost certainly changed the lives of all who joined it. That flash of history was not unique to Iraq. In fact, as Gideon Rachman pointed out in the Financial Times, 2019 saw many similar uprisings take place around the world – from as disparate places as Chile, Iran, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Bolivia, Algeria, Sudan, and Venezuela.

Recognising their importance, Anba and I felt a strong compulsion to bring these poems to life in English. She would do the first version of the poem, then we would look at it together and discuss each line, each word. Our discussions often took us down side alleys and byways of both languages until we agreed on a word that could sing as well in English as it had in the original. Now the book has been published, we share an overwhelming feeling of relief to be passing on the gift we had been given.

I think that sense of relief is part of the nature of witness poetry, and it is worth considering, briefly, what that means. Not everyone will have heard this term, one that is becoming more common in discussions of poetry from around the globe that tries to document state violence, and the human resistance to it. Yet around the world and throughout time, witness poetry has been important.


Demonstrators in Tahrir Square, Baghdad, photo Ziyad Matti

The 2014 edition of the Norton Anthology, Poetry of Witness is a thick volume, tracing this tradition in the English language. The book begins with Thomas More in the 1500’s, writing against the tyranny of Henry VIII and ends with the Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, writing from exile in America about the disintegration of his multicultural, multilingual country. As long as there has been collective trauma, there have been poets who have felt compelled to narrate it – not only for their own sense-making, but out of a belief that a poem might make it out from the battlefield and into the hearts and minds of the rest of the world more easily than any other art form.

In her introduction to the collection, American poet Carolyn Forché talks about witness poetry as an act of faith in the ethics of otherness. A witness poet writes to capture an act of violence, a moment of resistance, a protest, an injustice, out of a faith that language can connect us through time and space to the other who will mark, notice, record and ultimately make meaning out of what seems senseless, brutal and implacable.

Forché retells the story of Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, who lived through the persecutions of the Stalin era. Her husband was disappeared, and her son taken away to prison. The story goes that she was standing in line with the mothers and wives who waited by the prison walls for news of their loved ones, and was asked if she could write about the experience, and she said she could. Although Akhmatova had to burn her poems after they were memorised by her friends, she wrote out of faith that they would find their way out of her time and space to the listening ears of a wider world.


The great Russian poet and acmeist, Anna Akhmatova

Akhmatova was right, although she could not have really known how far and wide her fragile words would have flown. Her poems have outlasted the particular Ozymandias of her era.

Poetry is the most minor of art forms in the popular imagination, yet it seems uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness. Like a feather, it can slip through prison bars, travel on the lightest of winds, land far away smelling like cordite, singed at the edges, but still able to speak a truth that resonates inside us.

The first poet in our collection, Safa’a Al Sarai, uses this very metaphor. Safa’a was born in 1993 in Baghdad. From an early age, he was involved in protesting the Iraqi regime. He was a poet and a painter, who also completed a degree in computer science. Like many of his generation, he was unable to find work, despite his evident qualifications. He had managed to secure a position, finally, two weeks before he was killed by a direct hit of a gas cannister to his head.

Poetry is the most minor of art forms in the popular imagination, yet it seems uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness

Safa’a’s poem appears in our book with permission of his brother. In it, he writes about a naïve generation that “loaded vows” on the “wings of doves”, promises that were like “letters written on paper made of fear.” At the end of the poem, he calls on his companions to “keep going”; to “go on.”

Safa’a appears as a figure in many of the poems; after his death, he was named by the BBC as one of five iconic faces of protest in 2019, and even today, he can be recognised in posters, street art, t-shirts and banners, with his soulful eyes and Christ-like beard.

Safa’a was a long-standing campaigner, but some of the poets write about being taken by surprise by the force of their own response to this moment. Maytham Radi, an electrical engineer and one of the most widely published poets in the collection, writes about the moment when a life of conformity breaks into resistance: “Living in a city of yes/speaking as if I yes/and laughing like yes”, a safety “smashed and shattered in the form of no”: “a small no/a no that dreams when the world steps on him, it will cause some tiny pain.”

The youngest poet in the collection, Fouad Al-Hassan, was born in 2001. A member of the Yazidi community currently living in a refugee camp, he writes about what it might be like to live in a “normal” time, something as unimaginable, in reality, as changing his name.

“What if my name were other than Fouad/I mean what if I were a normal person?/Someone who doesn’t think about death/before sleeping, any more than Azreal would?” His images are heart-breaking in their seeming simplicity: “What would happen if rain fell on us/instead of the veil of rifle bullets?” What if is a question about how history has robbed a generation of their futures. Yet the act of writing is still an act of faith in that future.

In her essay at the end of the book, Anba writes about how moved she was by the young women in the collection. We have translated multiple poems from six remarkable young women. They represent a cohort that faced a double jeopardy in participating in the protests. While women were particularly targeted for assault or kidnapping, they were also often under strict orders from family members not to get involved or leave the house. They went out anyway – and dared to write about it.

Nour Darwish, an Arabic Language graduate who was unemployed at the time of the protests, recounts sneaking out against her parents’ wishes to bring apples to young men on the barricades. There is no doubt that the sense of being together in a moment of collective change and history-making was also intense and powerful, akin to the sensation of falling in love. Strangers supported each other, offering free medical care, food and books. “Tuk Tuk” drivers offered lifts or carried the injured away from the front lines.

In an interview with Anba, Nour described herself as “scared and happy” to be with other protesters “sharing this extraordinary time.”

Nour’s poem, Small Eyes Heave describes the young demonstrators with surreal, vivid images: Their feet move on their own/Walking in the street/Entering dirty hospitals/In new, ripped jeans…. Her last two lines mix vulnerability and defiance together: They have small shoulders/Mother/Shoulders that eat their backs while dancing.


Sama Hussein, the talented young poet

The final poem in the book belongs to Sama Hussein, a talented young writer who gathered most of the poems and was a key supporter behind the scenes. Born in 2000, she is still a student, but at the age of 19 has already published her first collection. The speaker in Sama’s poem imagines a time in the future when I will not carry a banner and protest/I’d rather carry a rose and perfume. God was wise, she writes when he made Iraq a male/to love him the way a girl loves doll’s houses.

Patriotism animates many of these poems – Iraq/the homeland/mother country – patriotism and solidarity. These are not poems of a generation that has been crushed; they are idealistic, hopeful, not cynical.

Sadly, as we know, Covid shut down the streets in most of the world. State violence and oppression has not ceased. While the protesters in Chile turned over their Pinochet-era constitution and the country has elected a new, young President, elsewhere, there are fewer signs of lasting change. Things seem as if they may be getting worse. Despite the creativity and energy of the protesters in Lebanon, the collapse of the currency has been followed by an exodus of those with enough mobility to flee. In Iraq, the President resigned but the young poets Anba knows report fears of being hunted down and disappeared while the eyes of the world are turned elsewhere. In the two countries where I hold citizenship, the US and the UK, civil rights also feel under threat.

Yet, if anything, this book reminds us that young people are born with hope, and will continue to demand a better world from those who have failed them.


Catherine Davidson is a dual UK/US citizen who grew up in LA and lives in London. Her novel based on stories about Greek mother and grandmother, The Priest Fainted was a New York and LA Times notable book of the year.  She has won awards for her poetry in both countries. She teaches Creative Writing at Regent’s University and is the former Chair of Exiled Writers Ink, an organisation the supports the voices of refugee writers. Most recently, she has published The Orchard with Gemma Media, a novel about genocide, family and apricot jam.


The Utopians of Tahrir Square is a collaboration with Dr. Anba Jawi, a writer born in Iraq who moved to the UK to complete her PhD in Geology at UCL. In 2004, she was honoured with an MBE for her services to the refugee sector. She publishes in Arabic and English; a chapter from her novel, The Silver Engraver, was included in the TLC Free Reads Anthology in 2019.




Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation, by Sudeep Sen

Poems Reviewed by Peter Cowlam

The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been proposed as the definition of the geological epoch dating from the start of significant human impact on the earth, and on its ecosystems. Anthropocene is also the title of Sudeep Sen’s latest (multi-genre) book of poetry, prose and photography – published in the UK in a handsome hardback edition from Pippa Rann Books. I have a feeling this won’t be the last poetic (and literary) outcry against the ravages we inflict on our planet, with the cost not only to ourselves.

While a reversal of human rapacity is the clarion call of our era, growing louder by the day, it’s far from clear that timely correctives will be put in place sufficient to avert ultimate catastrophe. Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate change is a reality, and that dangerous levels of CO2 and methane are rising in our atmosphere, there is vested interest, there are powerful lobbies – of governments and corporations – doggedly resistant to climate treaties and any meaningful change in consumer habits. Meanwhile the globe is subject to weather extremes, coral reefs suffer bleaching, seas and rivers fill with plastic, micro-plastics enter the food chain, over-trafficked towns and cities are obliged to impose congestion and emission charges. Plastic pollution has even been detected in human placenta.

That’s the grand narrative. But what of the personal? Anthropocene is divided into nine parts, and roughly these comprise, pessimistically, a survey of the background realities of the globe as it is today, an apocalyptic vision of the world as it degenerates, the impact of the pandemic in collective and individual terms, then, as an optimistic contrast, there are skyscape photographs taken from the author’s terrace in Delhi, there is a celebration of persons, places and geological phenomena, there are the consolations of light, friendship and human togetherness, in balance with strictures imposed by nations in lockdown, with a strategy for survival of those restrictions with our mental health intact. Finally there is an epilogue.

In Part 1, the prologue, the poet is fulsome in his prose description of what he terms the ‘choreograph [of] the seasonal orchestra’, the first of many alliances of his poetic method with music (somewhere later in the book we infer music as his restorative). Frida Kahlo heads up this section, with an epigraph: ‘I paint flowers so they will not die.’ But death is the stark reality, with a reported news feature from ‘the President of the island nation of Kiribati […] informing the rest of the world that [with rising sea levels] the first country to be submerged would be theirs – and that their people would be the first “climate refugees”.’ More of the politics is touched on, with the world and its elites taking not enough notice of what is actual – the planet’s ecological crisis, with it the resurgence of fascism, the pandemic, and resulting from it the misery of enforced migration, desperate peoples dispossessed in their droves. Where once the artist celebrated nature in its colour and diversity, now there is hard descent into warnings against its destruction. The weather has certainly changed.

Part 2 begins with a plaint against human folly in its rapacity, ‘where everything is ambition, / everything is desire, everything is nothing’ (the poem ‘Disembodied’, p28). We are confronted with variants of the apocalyptic: ‘…over-heated air sucks out everything’; ‘Rain where there never was, / no rain where there [once] was.’; ‘Climate patterns [in] total disarray’; ‘…man-made havoc.’; ‘Earthquakes – overground, underground, / undersea’; ‘destruction, death’; ‘cyclone, flood, / pestilence, pollution.’; ‘Stillness, ever still – all still-born’ (‘Global Warming’, p30), and in ‘Rising Sea Levels’ (p31) there is a granite outcrop that once jutted out of the ‘ebullient’ sea, fifty metres from the shore, but is seen no more. ‘Asphyxia’, the poem on page 37, tips its hat to Eliot, in an unreal city, with a yellow fog, and yellow smoke, and urges ‘Sweet Yamuna’ (not the Thames, but a river in northern India) to run softly, till the poet of our day has ended not his song but his dirge. On page 38, in ‘Summer Heat’, macadam melts into a viscous black sea, a neem tree is bleached of its natural colour, power lines are down, in all there is limitless barrenness, while on page 39, in ‘Amaltas’, ‘sparking laburnums / […] ignite, incinerate’ under a searing 48°C. Some vision, where the city is reduced in appearance to that of a ‘glass mirage’ (‘Heat Sand’, p40), and where the science fraternity is telling us of ‘new highs’, where ‘meteorological indices shatter’ (‘Afternoon Meltdown’, p41), ‘unfinished flyovers // collapse’ (‘Concrete Graves’, p43). The contrast to excessive heat is given us in ‘Endless Rain’ (page 44), but the rain is followed by drought, then by an unstoppable monsoon (‘Shower, Wake’, p47). Examples of what ails human agency in all this is summed in bronchial disorders (the physical) and the tragedy of accentuated social division (the psychological).

Part 3, ‘Pandemic’, bears the subtitle ‘Love in the Time of Corona’, an enforced disposition Marquez (who is surely invoked) would have immediately understood. Page 54 reproduces the front page of The New York Times (a) as a mortician’s black slab (or so it seemed to this reader) and (b) a roll of the dead, names listed when the US death rate as a result of the virus was touching 100,000, responded to in ‘Obituary’ (page 55) as a conflation of ‘micro point-size fonts / on an ever inflating pandemic’. In ‘Obituary 2: Nine Pins’ (page 61) the poet names those personally he has lost to the pandemic, and amid a fourteen-haiku sequence (‘Corona Haiku’, pp62–64) the question is asked ‘will we find a more / compassionate world, after / this pandemic’s death?’ One suspects that with our current crop of leaders, and the multinationals that have got them in their pocket, we cannot bank on it. As to our mental health, ‘lockdown’s uneasy / solitude – turning into / another disease’ (page 64) does not give us hope of instant remedies, once the viral threat has passed, despite some few emollients (see Part 4, ‘Contagion’).

Part 4, ‘Contagion’. Can they salve the pain, a ‘eucalyptus steam inhalation, Ventolin sprays’, a ‘mixed concoction of ginger’, ‘black pepper, turmeric and organic honey’ (‘Implosion’, p79)? Or with these is there only ‘temporary respite’ (ibid)? Can machine technology ease the stress, with a charge of air from an electric vent? ‘I like this hellishly good blast that shakes all the embedded molecules in my bones’ (‘Icicles’, p81). ‘Fever Pitch’ (page 82), which in its epigraph recalls Thom Gunn and his man with night sweats, has its variation on that theme in an age of climate change and contagion: ‘The unknown boiling and freezing points that I hide within myself provide the ultimate enigma that even the most specialized doctors and architects find hard to map.’ Here more than ever throughout these poems we see what in the poet’s mind exists as the opposition, seldom a dialogue, between art and science. In their conflicting strategies in defining the human malaise ‘there is no room for unscientific thought’, or more fully, from ‘Heavy Water’, pp87-89)—

Families of electrons, protons and neutrons speed away, whirring in patterned loops, forgetting all the while that the heart of their orbit may actually feel and breathe. But in science, there is no room for unscientific thought – as if science and the arts, coolness and emotionality were mutually incompatible or different from each other.

In a pandemic the truth of our mortality is brought closer into consciousness (‘Preparing For a Perfect Death’, p91)—

Get your papers in order choose / your inheritors fairly – with love, care. // Outline clearly – who gets what, / what they are required to execute.

And in ‘Icarus’ (pp92–93) there might even be a death wish: ‘The image of Icarus has been flying around / in my head. I cannot get rid of it….’ ‘I pray for Icarus to return to take me / away….’ But here among us earth-dwellers who have not crashed from the sky there are still life’s attractions. Instance Dinesh Khanna’s photograph on page 96, precursor to a meal (feasting, a social event), of chopped red onions, chopped red peppers and a clove of garlic on a chopping board with knives, despite the poet’s irresistible urge to make a crucifix out of the latter. ‘Corona Red’ (page 97) is the poem that accompanies (‘…is this a new metaphor of our / times?’). And after the metaphor, what are the other symptoms of our troubled era? The testing of friendships in enforced social distancing (‘Scar’, p99)? The alarming rate at which both fake news and the coronavirus replicate (‘Ghalib in the Time of Crisis’, pp100–101)? They are certainly among the leading contenders.

Sudeep Sen

Part 5, subtitled ‘Skyscapes’, sees text give way to a series of photos the poet took from his terrace in Delhi, with his focus on a single subject (an horizon washed with trees, low-rise flat-roofed buildings and their attachments), under a big sky and subject to differing lighting conditions, ranging from evening twilight to cloudy to inky to fiery sunsets.

Part 6, ‘Holocene’, scientifically the interval of geologic time, approximately the last 11,700 years of Earth’s history, wherein the influence of human activity has been so profound it is deemed appropriate to ascribe its own name (cp ‘Anthropocene’). Poems in this section include a celebration of persons, places, and the terrible majesty of geological phenomena: ‘Four centuries ago, Akrotiri’s ancient site fell / grandly to volcanic death, victim of several quakes’ (‘Akrotiri’, p121). There is a homage to Derek Walcott. English hours take in a visit to Herefordshire, and with it the concretion of passing moments, with ‘…the kind of clock I want to measure time by – / time that depends / on the company of those who care – / time minutely layered / on this open windblown Herefordshire terrain…’ (‘Witherstone’, pp122–125). Another sequence of haiku (‘Undercurrents: 20 Lake Haiku’, pages 126–128) offers similar lyricism: ‘geese squeak, cormorants / dive, fish summersault…’ We are in Marseilles when, philosophically, the question is asked ‘Have these voyagers left something behind, / or are they yearning / to complete the incompleteness / in their lives?’ (‘Disembodied 2: Les Voyageurs’, p129). The section ends with ‘Disembodied 3: Within’ (page 130), and further philosophical probing: ‘…life, birth, death – / regermination, rejuvenation, nirvana.’

Part 7, ‘Consolation’, cinematically introduced by Stanley Kubrick: ‘However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.’ In life there is hope, and in death there are hopes for an afterlife (‘Burning Ghats, Varanasi’, (pages 136–137)—

In the super-heated pyre, I hear another ritual pot break,

                     another skull crack, another soul take flight.

I see some shore-temples slow-sink

                                                         into the swallowing river –

effects of unpredictable tides and climate change

         taking with them, both the mortal and the immortal –

Holocene’s carbon-footprint – its death text, unceasing.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust –

                                 water to heavy water, life to after-life.’

And from ‘Ganga, Rising’ (page 138)—

Here, there is no space for perfectly rounded pebbles or gentle musings – only large granite

outcrops can shackle the soul’s ferocity – a jagged fierceness – not harsh, yet quietly robust.

And from ‘Shiuli | Harasingara’ (page 140)—

Soon the festivities, food,

     flowers, camaraderie,

prayer, will infuse everything –

We are reminded in ‘Breastfeeding’ (page 150) of the social world and how that does not necessarily comply with the strictures of science, in that love is an imperfect equation, and similarly in ‘Air: Pankhā Pattachitra’ (page 151) are reminded of ‘the spare simplicity / of pure clean air.’ Not everything is lost.

Part 8, ‘Lockdown’. The writer has a natural, inborn, and after years of toil a disciplined strategy for dealing with the solitude and lack of social contact national lockdowns have imposed on the masses. It’s to be found in recourse to writing and reading, and has a distinct advantage over exploit and action in the world, its locus described in full in ‘Poetics of Solitude, Songs of Silence’ (pp162–165). But there are other pastimes more easily called upon: ‘words of grief; words of love, hate, wisdom. / Paper crafts its papyrus origins // journeying from tree to table / through clefts, wefts, contours, textures…’ (‘Paper T[r]ails’, p157). And what were the things we did in early childhood?

Part 9, ‘Epilogue’, is in the nature of a linked list, with prayer and meditation, closing with a chant and a cerement, and a rite of passage for the dying, where ‘breathing is a privilege’, ‘friends perish, the country buckles, airless’, sentiments which might seem pessimistic as a conclusion. However, one has only to remember how inexcusably reluctant governments, corporations, and we as individuals have been in meeting the challenge our post-industrial way of life has thrown at us, when at the same time there remains a volume of powerful voices denying human complicity in our current climate disaster, with the Holocene an inter-glacial period where warming is said to happen anyway, regardless of us. But even if that is so, the amount of CO2 and methane we are pumping into the atmosphere is measurable, and has reached proportions we know are not good for us, for other species, and for the planet in general. And for as long as that is the case, there is need for the poems of Anthropocene, and for their author, Sudeep Sen, who with his wide fanbase, and this latest offering, will not disappoint its members.

En passant Noted, throughout Anthropocene, is the author’s fondness for skeletal imagery, frequent reference to bronchial irritations, and the condition asthmatics endure in the drawing of breath. Noted too are life’s dramas in comparison with the operatic, ‘striation’ and its cognates a favourite word, and, unsurprisingly given the book’s subject matter, repeated reference to meteorological phenomena, weather events, cloud shapes, cloud formations, cloud breaks, layered skies, and as metaphysical embodiment errant clouds yearning for rain.


Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 19802015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury) and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann).  Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over twenty-five languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN IBN, NDTV, AIR & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf / Random House / Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture / literature”.

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


On The Rocks

A poem by Yogesh Patel

bottle of liquor near glass of manhattan
Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels.com

On The Rocks

It was easy to speak of all things absurd.
I didn’t drink Jack Daniel’s responsibly.
Yes, there was slur and anger and the spat.
The slur was not intentional. Shit happens!
It was good to speak like a foreigner as
a bloody foreigner. That’s the double malt?
Well, there is no such thing! So a blend!
The blend one becomes with one’s love.
Be neither here nor there! Avoid trouble.
The intoxication reminds me of being myself.
But my independence has never been bottled
or brewed or distilled in any Scotland.
It is not trapped in 1919-1921, nor has it
wandered into the illicit moonshine of 1780.
It is easy to speak of love for all
when one’s empire ends with the lie
that puffs ‘Train to Pakistan’
and commonwealth. The reality
lives in the night after jazz.
Courage is an eternal, euphoric spirit.
And only the spirit makes me
speak aloud. And the trying
freedom always needs it.
I dare it only under the influence!
You should too if you wish to survive.
Always blame the rebellion on whisky.
Be free and speak utter nonsense.
Yes, yes, say, you drank
irresponsibly as it shouldn’t be.
Be glad, enjoy uncertainties.
Everything dances on the rocks;

Yogesh Patel’s recent collection, The Rapids, is published by The London Magazine.

Yogesh Patel, a co-editor of Skylark, runs Skylark Publications UK and a non-profit Word Masala project. A founder of the literary charity, Gujarati Literary Academy, he has been honoured with the Freedom of the City of London. With LP records, films, radio, children’s book, fiction, non-fiction books and three poetry collections to his credit, in 2017, he was presented to The Queen at Buckingham Palace to represent the best in poetry. He was the Poet-of-Honor at NYU in April 2019. A recipient of many awards, and published in many magazines and anthologies, he has read in the House of Lords and the National Poetry Library.

www.patelyogesh.co.uk, www.skylarkpublications.co.uk

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