Poetry
A short story and poetry competition from UK with a mission!
Here is a contest in which every entry will ensure a tree planted in the Bore region of Kenya — the only writing competition in the world to plant a tree for every entry!
The short story can be upto 4000 words and poetry upto 50 lines. You are free to choose the subject!
Book Review by Kaiyi Tan
Title: Sightlines
Author: Marc Nair
Photographer: Tsen-Waye Tay
Publisher: Math Press, 2019
I must first confess that I did not like Sightlines when I first read it. As I absorbed this book of poems with photography by Marc Nair and Tsen-Waye Tay, I couldn’t help but feel that a certain song-like lyricism was missing. Usually, my first instinct is to judge verses based solely on the quality of sound alone. Meaning can be secondary, as long as the words form a particular harmony. Knowing that Marc Nair is an established poet in Singapore with a huge reputation for spoken word, I was slightly disappointed.
But on my second reading, something very simple happened.
I followed the recommendation in Mr. Nair’s introduction: I read the poems with the images in mind. And suddenly, like Blake’s experience of seeing a world in a grain of sand, the entire book changed for me. Mr. Nair’s words, together with the stark and beautiful photography of Ms. Tay, emerged as mini-narratives of their own.
Arlene Yandug earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She teaches literature and creative writing at Xavier University where she also works as manager of XU Press and editor of Carayan, an online literary journal. She is currently editing an anthology of writers from Northern Mindanao, while working on her manuscript for her first poetry collection.
By San Lin Tun
Myanmar modern poetry became popular and gained much momentum in 1970’s. They often appeared in the reputable journal, Moe Way Literary Magazine. The young poets liked the flavours explored in Htinn Yoo Pin Yeik (The Shade of Pine Tree), a collection of English poems which had been translated by the literary genius of Maung Tha Noe. The youth attempted to use the techniques used by poets translated in this pioneering collection.
Conventional poets criticized them for not following the classical styles of poetry writing. The old school poets said that modern poems did not follow the conventional versification forms. While conventional poets preferred “rhymes and rhyming systems”, modern poets used “rhythms and un-rhymes systems” in their poems which resembled “free verse” and allusions to literature and the world outside of Myanmar.
A well-known Myanmar modern poet Aung Cheint reinforced: “There are no hard and fast rules or ways to write Myanmar modern poetry. They read English poetry books and translated poems. They felt inspired by reading them and tried to compose modern poems like them. In that way, Myanmar modern poetry came into existence.”
Among those rebellious young poets, Maung Lin Yeik was one of the prominent exponents of Myanmar modern poetry. Though he worked as a technical school teacher, he wrote poetry that won admiration and praise from both fellow poets as well as the readers. As a part of Myanmar Poet Union in 2010, he participated in poetry readings and literary festivals within the country. He talked more about modern poetry than conventional one.
Book Review by Dr. Anisur Rahman
Book: Till the Next Wave Comes
Poet: Sarita Jenamani
Publisher: Dhauli Books, 2018
A poem is not
a luminous firework
It is a lonely shooting star
struck off
from the forehead
of the firmament (“Poem”, 69)
(Excerpted from A Poem is Not a Luminous Firework: Sarita Jenamani in Her Poetry Workshop)
Constructed around four vibrant images, this definitional piece made me wonder if a poem is a curious construct for Sarita Jenamani. A moment later, I turned curious to find whether the poem comes in her grip, or gives her a slip, in a moment of becoming. To test this, I moved back and forth with seventy nine poems included in her collection Till the Next Wave Comes. In doing so, I found myself defining and redefining her poetics as any curious reader would do in the process of reading poetry. While reading the poems with shorter and longer breaks, I confirmed that a poem to her was a unit of a larger body of expression called poetry that sought its strength from sharp images and mixed metaphors, as also with acute turns of expressions and implied silences.
Jenamani’s poetry has allowed me a passage to a rich habitat of people and a veritable range of moods and modes of living. She chooses to draw upon locations near and far, conditions real and eerie, and people alive and lost in time. As she turns her words into images and images into metaphors, she transforms her memories into fantasies and conditions of living into those of loving. Her long and short poems are like breaths punctuated with regular strokes of strength. She survives through drifting and static scenarios that most of her poems represent.
Jenamani is a poet in English and Oriya. She lives in Vienna, Austria. She is the general secretary of Austrian Chapter of PEN International. She is the co-editor of an Austria based bilingual magazine for migrant literature Words & Worlds.
Title: As Slow As Possible
Author: Kit Fan
Publisher: Arc Publications
Year of Publication: 2018
Links: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/kit-fan-as-slow-as-possible-584
Among School Teachers
The gate closed, bell unanswered, basketball court
stripped bare to lines and sparrows.
July is never the month for learning.
A school on Clear Water Bay Road, yet no water
bay, nor road. A bridge, along the scar of a hill
through the Lotus-flowered Magnolias I used to cross over
to the clamour of books.
A month of no children, but the translucent playground
after rain recalls the aftermath of hide-and-seek:
What’s the time, Mr Wolf?
Durga Puja is celebrated by Bengalis and Assamese with much colour and fanfare all over the world, with the same spirit as Chinese New Year, Id (Hari raya) or Christmas. It starts this year from the October 4th evening and continues to October 9th. Here are two poems written by Amlanjyoti Goswami for this occasion.
A New Yorker Misses Durga Puja
I do not miss much
But sometimes
Stopping by the 45th and 5th
When my avenues and streets get mixed up
I look up
See towers in steel
Hear the giant rumbling
A little feeling enters me
Like a hotdog crumb between my teeth
And I feel
What they must feel…
The crowd heaving, thunder drums, evening lamps
The goddess with those fiery eyes.
But the moment passes.
I walk on.
A train to catch, a deadline nearing…
Prathap Kamath’s published works are Ekalavya: a book of poems(2012), Blood Rain and Other Stories (2014) and Tableaux: poems of life and creatures (2017). His poems have been anthologized in The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India (Hidden Brook Press, 2013), and published in journals like Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Chandrabhaga, Muse India, Open Road Review, Modern Literature, Madras Courier, Literary Yard, Tuck Magazine, ONE, The Wagon Magazine etc. He teaches English under the University of Kerala.
Book Review by Namrata
Title: Animalia Indica –The Finest Animal Stories in Indian Literature
Editor: Sumana Roy
Publisher: Aleph Book Company (2019)
Edited by Sumana Roy, Animalia Indica is a first of its kind collection of animal stories in Indian literature. From classic story tellers like R.K.Narayan, Premchand, Rudyard Kipling to the most recent maestros like Kanishk Tharoor, Perumal Murugan, and Nilanjana Roy, this collection features them all.
Sumana Roy is a Siliguri based author whose previous works include a non-fiction title (How I became a tree), a fiction novel (Missing) and a poetry collection (Out of Syllabus). She went on to win the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award in 2017 for her debut book How I became a tree.
This anthology, with its beautiful cover, has twenty-one stories about humans and animals. It can easily be called a collector’s edition with the who’s who of Indian literature featured within. Not all of the collection is made of short stories. There are some poems; excerpts; two are novellas and one is an entire novel in its own. The selection is classic! It includes stories translated from regional languages and from Indian writing in English, with interesting end-notes about the narrative, authors and translators. The magic of the stories makes something written in 1981 an equally intriguing read as one written recently. What makes the book even more eye catching and unique, are the sketches by Rohan Dahotre before each story (he has also done the stunning cover). Depicting the animal/s featured in each story, these black and white sketches set the tone for every tale that follows.
Sonia Mukherji was born in Kolkata and recently moved to London after living in New York for ten years. She graduated from the Kundiman fellowship program and her poetry has been published and translated in the U.S. and internationally in literary journals including Stylus, Shampoo Poetry, Urhalphool, Kolkata’s The Little Magazine, Prothom Alo, The Dhaka Tribune, Bhorer Kagoj and the J’aipur Journal. She was a finalist for the Amy Awards and the AALR a lettre initiative. She was given an international poetry feature in Kolkata, which was held at the cultural institute Nandan, hosted by the Bengali poet Subodh Sarkar, reviewed by the literary journal Bhashanagar, and televised.
