Always trust the witches: Keki Daruwalla on poetry from the Northeast and elsewhere in India
Let’s draw a circle on a sheet of paper and call it earth, say these poets.
The instruments of darkness, by which Shakespeare, and perforce I mean the witches, came to me a few nights ago and they first said:
“I see through dark, take my call
The queen will win but still she’ll fall.”
The second witch, more explicit, said:
“Double double toil and trouble
Trump will win. All will be rubble.”
The third:
“Fair is foul and foul is fair
Poisoned will be Delhi’s air.
New York? Worse, if you walk in
to a liberal’s affrighted lair.”
Being less credulous than Macbeth, I paid no heed and am left with regrets. If I knew a bookie and had trusted the witches, I could have made some demonetised money by betting on Donald Trump. Moral of the story: never underrate a huckster or a groper in an election.
To poetry then. There are some poets you feel honoured to write about. Two of them — Eunice de Souza and Saleem Peeradina — have published recently. Peeradina, once from Bombay (not Mumbai then), lives now in Michigan and teaches at Siena Heights University. His fifth collection, Final Cut, published from Valley Press, Scarborough, U.K., is as effortlessly chiselled a volume as you are likely to find. The poems are still life vignettes on birds, fruit, and ruminations. To quote Craig Raine, “These poems are hymns of praise — to birds, to objects, to fruits and to our human bodies…” He goes on to say that “Saleem Peeradina is one of the most important Indian poets writing in the English language.” Read more
Source: The Hindu
