NEW WORLDS is a new section to showcase writers from the "neo-antipodes and diasporas".
Editor Michelle Cahill writes in one e-mail:
"We are really delighted to be publishing your fine work in Mascara Literary Review. It will be as part of a section titled "New Worlds", featuring work from the states/northern hemisphere."
and in the other:
"Your poems are wonderful. Do keep in contact. You may wish to consider writing a review in future."
In the main Poetry section, there is my favorite Indian poet Keki N Daruwalla's poems and Sukrita Paul Kumar's work as well. Really feels good to be in Keki's company! My friend on Facebook, Anuradha Vijayakrishnan's excellent poetry is also there.
I love ALEPH and so let me reproduce it here too:
Aleph
The first sound uttered is always forgotten
Possibly it is never even a word. Just
An interjection that derives from faraway
Fears or an anxious rhythm of speech.
The first sound can be heard quite clear
When groans and grunts are taken care
Of with mighty sweep of authorized
Hands that also stifle songs and smiles.
If you were a baby or a doddering pair
Of legs, your first word would be despair
Not a calligrapher’s delight in dusky ink
Blinking away in the heliotrope night.
In one little fable the first letter was
Meant to be the first word of wonder
But no one wrote it down and so later
The ocean took it with fish and dead matter.
5 comments:
Truly marvelous! I have two little questions here which I will post on facebook.
Congratulations!
I am gonna put down what Tim and Priti wrote on FB for the poems in Mascara. Thanks you both! I will write personally to you in discussion of these poems...
PRITI: Really good. Really marvel at your range of themes and your confident ability to weave different allusions into a piece. Every time i read you and other poets I think of the interminably long distance i have to cover. And then i tell myself - enjoy what is given to you; don't get embroiled in self-doubt.
Two curious questions:
Why would 'a baby's first word be despair'?
What is 'the little fable' you are referring to?
TIM: "Aleph" -- makes you think; makes you feel something about early weirdness...and about the mystery of language. I wonder what Noam Chomsky would think about this poem? I wonder what George Steiner would think? Our first word, an eruption of raw essence: a precious sound lost in moving time and the opiate of experience unstoppable. And all the larger dull apes fail to register and enter the sacral moment...the passage of wonder into first word.
This is a beautifully written poem.
-----
"Living Room Homily" -- I can't penetrate this one. The fault is surely mine as a dull reader. I could not piece together what this might be urging as a whole. I could not connect the "action" from one stanza to another. I do want to know what it's about. It seems like it's about something significant.
I love that sound of mystery tip-toing behind the curtain of some poems.
Well the ocean spits out pearls and that is the beginning of things and the writing of later poems, isn't it?
Very nice one.... Brings to mind a biblical phrase.. " in the beginning was the Word..." I guess the first sound is that.. it reverberates throughout creation... whether written or other wise.
Thanks Nabina... and congratulations on the publication.
I also had the same impression as Runechris... "In the beginning..."
Anyway I read this poem again and found to my delight it had grown on me - just loved it all the more.
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