Touch by Abhinav Kumar Abhinav Kumar is a 24 year old corporate lawyer from Delhi, India. His short […]
Category Archive: Poetry
Poetry
Proscenium and Last Yarn by Iain Lim Jun Rui Iain Lim Jun Rui an aspiring poet and filmmaker. A […]
Title: Eucalyptus Sextet
Author: Jane Bhandari
Publisher: Bombaykala Books (November 2018)
Pages: 96
The Itch
I sipped love from your lips
and warmed my soul against your body,
then left you sleeping
while I wrote of love.
The best was that morning
flavoured with delight:
After a night
spent drinking your body
I arose to write it down
before I lost the savour
and you slept, not knowing
I had turned satisfaction
into a number of words.
If I had known
you would go so soon
I would have left writing
till later: but what I had
was an itch
that would not be scratched,
and still I write of it.
Comfort Chores
Something comforting in the routine
of domesticity: The way
one chore follows upon another:
The clothes to be ironed
the plates to be washed
the food to be cooked.
Shower, dress, and wait
for the telephone to ring.
A little music, the television
blaring inane laughter.
The sun shines steadily.
I go to the bank, the market,
meet a friend, read a book…
such a comfortable routine
to settle back into,
so boring, so alone.
Reviewed by Mitali Chakravarty
Title: B-Sides and Backslides: 1986-2018
Author: Felix Cheong
Publisher: Math Paper Press by Books Actually
Pages: 95
ISBN 978-981-11-7304-2
B-Sides and Backslides is the award-winning Singaporean poet Felix Cheong’s collection panning the development of his poetry from 1986 to 2018. In the foreword, the poet writes, ‘These are pieces which… could not find their place in my published volumes.’ The title alludes to ‘the flipsides’ of his poetry. He compares them to the B-Sides of Beatles’ albums, which often had songs that were really interesting but not top of the charts. They remain an interesting part of a creative process. However, he claims that he has not ‘blackslid even if it might appear so,’ and in that spirit, his poetry touches our lives with its humour and variety.
The book is divided into different periods of his development as a poet. In “Juvenalia”, the section tracing his development as a poet for the first nine years, he says, ‘In various voices and versions, I have been trying to rewrite Prufrock the past thirty years…’ However, through the course of his poetry we can see how he transcends the torpor of the procrastinating Prufrock (“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T. S. Eliot, 1910) and the angst generated by Hollow Men (T. S. Eliot, 1925) to become a caricaturist of Singapore life, politics and culture. In “We are the Salarymen”, with an epigraph of the first two lines of Hollow Men, he concludes,
We maybe the hollow men,
but the least we own
is our honesty to know
we have the means to fill
and fulfil this emptiness,
unlike you,
stuffed fool and full of yourself,
little more than moans and bones
on a high horse galloping
with the weight of a lost world.
Yeti with a Tilak by Manu Kant This poem is part of a series about Asifa Bano – […]
(By Keki N. Daruwala. From The Hindu. Link to the complete article given below) Glorious autumn! Even Delhi […]
“I am indebted to the British poet, actor, and soldier James Milton Hayes, whose poem ‘The Green Eyes of a Yellow Little God’ with its opening line ‘There is a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu’ fired my imagination to name this collection of poems The Eight-eyed Lord of Kathmandu. Hayes wrote his immortal dramatic monologue over a century ago in 1911 just in five hours. Incidentally, he did not consider it as poetry. Following the footsteps of Hayes, a century later, I have made a humble attempt to draw a poetic portrait of Nepal through my poems on World Heritage sites, festivals, places, landscapes, historical personalities as well as its present inhabitants. My time spent in Nepal from July 2012 to January 2016 was full of bliss, learning and adventure.”
ABHAY K
Sherpa
I lead the way to Mt. Everest, paving the path through snow
and ice, fearless of losing fingers to frostbite.
Conquering Everest your face glows like a field of poppies.
Descending the mountain my feverish body breaks.
Your weight on my back. A few dollars in my hand.
Old Lamp by Abin Chakraborty Abin Chakraborty teaches English literature in Chandernagore College, avidly discusses politico-cultural trends, believes […]
(From Singlitstation. Link to the post given below) The Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry invites editors of […]
Reviewed by Rajat Chaudhuri
Title: Crow Dusk
Author: Mark Floyer
Publisher: Paekakariki Press (London, 2017)
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Lilting Bengali melodies drift out of its pages. A crackle of old transistor radios animates the backdrop of ayahs, chowkidars and mosquito nets as crows descend for shelter amongst the banyans of a tropical night. Crow Dusk (Paekakariki Press), Mark Floyer’s collection of poems about Calcutta, the city where he spent his early childhood, is replete with images, sounds, smells and reflections about a place, a people and a country which is intricately woven into the fabric of his life and that of his ancestors.
Floyer’s great, great, great grandfather was John Shore, Governor General of Bengal (1793-1797) succeeding Cornwallis, who also became President of the Asiatic Society. Shore was a close friend of William Jones. The poet of Crow Dusk, while mentioning his ancestor in conversations, characterises him as ‘obscure’, perhaps rightly so, in contrast to his predecessor Cornwallis. However, in his well-crafted poems Floyer, who cites Arun Kolatkar as a major influence, casts the centuries old association of his family with India and the region as a backdrop for the evocations of boyhood and his renewed engagement with the city of Calcutta.
Half of his Calcutta poems are about his memories of the city, his home here and his family and the other half is about his return to find how it has changed. In the eponymous Crow Dusk, the poet writes,
And always crows
suspended high on rooftops and telephone wires
gathering to croak their dusk chorus
kaaa kaaa
their black hoods
silhouetted against the purple disc of the sun. …
Sights, sounds and smells of this Calcutta of the late 1950s come alive in these carefully crafted imagist poems which surprise us with their sharp remembrances, distanced as they are by the smoke and dust of five and a half decades. This digging into the past is never an easy task as he alludes to in the poem Underwater, ‘I probe my diver’s torch for the rusting detritus of memories’.
