October 2019

Volume VII | Issue 3

Curatorial Note

I’m editing an issue after a gap of over two years. During this time, guest editors from various parts of our threatened, teetering planet curated the quarterly; each one having created an issue to be treasured. Please read these issues again here. You will be gladdened!

This installment is a double issue and introduces many firsts.

Breaking precedent, we present new work by poets previously featured on Poetry at Sangam. We begin with Ranjit Hoskote’s thrilling adventures that crisscross time, spaces and the sands of the sacred.

Another first: we include poetry/spare vignettes with visuals. In truth, Joseph Schreiber’s tender and marrow-piercing In the dreaming land inspired this addition. I had to share the work in its complete form. Read, too, his chiselled voice and vision in some remarkable new poems.

We also introduce music links thanks to Anjali Purohit’s translations of Sant Eknath. Fittingly, she captures the urgent sung quality of the medieval Marathi saint-poet’s bharoods. Jerry Pinto and musician Neela Bhagwat’s renderings of the bhakti-steeped abhangs of Soyarabai, Muktabai and Janabai run like glinting water and clear a space in the mind. From the Urdu we present Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s political poems translated with vibrance and nuance by Vinita Agrawal, and Ranjit Hoskote skins Mir Taqi Mir’s she’rs into luminous couplets.

Also, a new treat awaits you! I have requested the poets to send in a ‘Creative CV’ or a ‘Poet’s Note’, so that they speak directly to you. Read —

Aakriti Kuntal’s strong and startling poems that bleed into the mouth and senses;

Ashwani Kumar combines the real and the surreal while spinning language like a top;

Women’s voices of courage and compassion arise, as in Bina Sarkar Ellias’ palpitating anthems to the present and Naima Rashid’s cocoon of words, identity and memory;

Keki Daruwalla’s seemingly ‘light’ poems that bite; he laughs at the world’s foibles and tosses them away in limerick-like lines;

Mrinalini Harchandrai offers sophisticated eco-poetry of the soul that cascade alternately between quivering intensity and insouciance;

Saima Afreen’s poems rise like a ‘poppy of blood’ with ‘lips of faded maps’ – these are offerings of aesthetic delight, culled from her travels;

Satya Prakash Dash’s poems are elegies to the self, sensuality and street life and read like poured silk;

Suhit Kelkar’s muscular poems explore myth and transformations under the mind’s lucent, shifting light;

Vinita Agrawal’s contemplative voice gives us poems that whisper and hold a prism to the emotional states of bereavement and strength.

Perhaps what we write is the raft we make of ourselves; or the buoy adrift in inky oceans that twinkle in code: make me part of your being.

My deep gratitude to each contributor who has made this issue very special; and thanks to our webmaster, Saurabh Agarwal who fought difficult deadlines to make this issue happen. And to you, dear reader and kindred literary adventurer, for whom Poetry at Sangam exists.

Priya