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Editorial: 15 March 2011

March 11, 2011
The poems of our second March issue are crafted, surprising and tender, reacting with deep poetic sensibility to local natural and domestic environments, and reaching out with love to the people that inhabit those spaces.
The India domain presents poetry in Hindi, Malayam and English from four diverse poets whose work shares the focal points of community, family and daily domestic life. “If you were to look for a recurrent trope in the 27th edition of the India domain, you’d find two: aunts and brooms!” writes PIW India editor Arundhathi Subramaniam in her introduction to the issue. Aunts are under-celebrated in poetry, yet these poems emphasise the importance of kinship and family, presenting aunts as strong women who are loved and respected by their nieces and nephews. Hindi poet Prabhat for instance writes of a deceased aunt at the end of ‘A Happiness There Was’: “The old aunt is still very much in our lives / just as absurd, just as naive, just as rustic / but not visible anywhere any longer / Like a tree fallen by the ridge of a field”, while, in a surprising ending that redirects the hitherto descriptive poem ‘Jambul Tree’, Marilyn Noronha also likens an uprooted tree to one of her aunts.

Tree imagery continues in Anitha Thampi’s ‘Fruit, As It Is’, a subtle and complex feminist subversion of traditional poetic associations of ripe fruit with female fecundity. In what is almost an anti-metaphor poem, Thampi alludes to yet substitutes the sexual associations with the ripe jackfruit with clear, sharp images from domestic life; a female painter depicts jackfruits on the tree “just as they are” –

not fashioned as breasts on the female trunk

Not as split body parts
as openings and wounds
but
as if two minutes ago
Mother had
cut it in two with a knife
and laid it on the bare floor


Similarly, in her list poem, ‘Divorce’, English-language poet Gayatri Majumdar simultaneously employs and shrugs off poetic metaphor as she casts a dispassionate eye over the contents of a shared home at the end of a marriage: “all articles, / mostly nouns, some prepositions, / not one metaphor, / no verbs either”, ends the poem, wryly. It’s interesting to compare this poem to Prabhat’s ‘Broom’, which also considers the way in which we map our social interactions and internal feelings onto the domestic space around us: sweeping away “something meaningless”, muses Prabhat in this poem, can have a profound effect on how one feels in one’s own home, even though “The house and its surroundings [ . . . ] / have stayed about the same”.

National poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, featured on the PIW UK domain, also recognises the importance of the domestic landscape, and it sensory details, as a locus for memory, love and loss, as well as a departure point for considering the larger world. In ‘Six Bells’, a poem about the Six Bells Colliery disaster, for instance, she reimagines the moment of the explosion not through the eyes of the miners who were killed, but from the perspective of someone whose family life would be affected by the disaster, “a woman hanging out the wash”, who perhaps “paused, hearing something, a sudden hush, / a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart”, while in ‘The Blue Hydrangeas’, the flowers brought into the house evoke the narrator’s departed mother’s silk dress, as well as the memory of touching her skin.

Scottish poet John Glenday’s ‘What My Mother Called Me’ also takes domestic space as the memory-site for the invocation of the narrator’s mother, in this case an apparition “settling from the air”. Yet it is the landscape of language, rather than of domestic objects, that is ultimately the site of memory and interaction, as she

mouthed the word it was she had called me by, which was
my father’s also, with an upturn to its only syllable, as if it
were a question she had never framed before.


Glenday’s quiet and wonderful ‘Famous Last Words’ also considers the ways in which love and language interact, examining the interplay of silent nature and speaking human, recognising that speech prevents forgetting – “I speak for my dark father, who floats face down / in the slack shadow-waters of memory, his mouth / rinsed clean of air”, he writes.

Our final poet of this issue, Philip Gross, delights in exploration of the linguistic landscape too, evident in ‘The Boat Made of Poems’ – “its timbers creak / in the language of every port it has put into – / the backchat, the patois, / the babble, the Babel, the smuggled rich lingo / of each dockside bar”. The extract from ‘Vocable’, a beautiful apostrophe to someone aging, chimes with Glenday’s examination of silence, communication and the inevitability of speech:

Ninety now, you’re adrift on the vowel-stream,
the crisp edge of all your five languages gone

and we’re back to the least of language.
It’s all one, your, his or my slight modulations of the bare
vowel of animal need . . .

In our shared bare vowels, it seems, we can communicate our common human experience; the poems of this issue show the ways too in which written language can convey praise, commemoration and love of those closest to us.
© Sarah Ream
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