Poets Printery

Mdantsane Breathing is my latest book, a coffee table hard cover lavishly illustrated poetry book which is first of its kind describing in poetry and watercolors the vibrant culture of Mdantsane which is the second biggest township after Soweto.
The world knew about the Soweto Uprising, the Sowetan Poets and Winnie Mandela who still lives there.
The popular news paper The Sowetan remains a mark of courage during the apartheid times and after.
But nobody wrote about Mdantsane and its heroic participation against the apartheid government.
This book brings to you for the first time of a strange life that insists to be told and that persists within all of us who were witness of those struggle days.
A poem and water color of Siviwe is on the jacket flap of this book
Siviwe is a former soldier of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress.
The book is dedicated to the brave people of Mdantsane.
Wikipedia - About Mdantsane

Mdantsane Breathing
Publisher - Poets Printery, South Africa
ISBN - 978-0-620-46040-8
Price - Rand 760 including postage

The book opens with the poetry of Pritish Nandy from his book Riding the Midnight River

‘drawing suns
near her breast
where the lilacs are
the word
of strange blind men

If art is defined as a subjective ordering of the objective reality or as a meeting place of the subjective and the objective, then Amitabh Mitra’s Leaping the Lilac Sun is a perfect specimen of it, capturing the myriad moods of nature, landscape and nostalgia in the form of painting and poetry. The still frames of visual imagination go well along with the perfectly crafted companion poems, fused together with the poet’s vision and love of beauty. The lilac sun is a visionary symbol of transmuting the particular into the universal, the chaos into the cosmos, and the flux of life into the static emotions; the outer and the inner, nature and self, coalesce and form a correspondence under the lilac sun.
Leaping the Lilac Sun is a bright book of life, exuberant and romantic, and bears testimony to the poet’s deep involvement with life. The wholeness and hopefulness of life is unmistakable in the first poem.

dreams resplendent with green
i walk up the trees reaching the sky
i didn’t find any gashes or bleeding wounds
on its back
nobody has yet stabbed it
birds swim through an easy breast stroke
and flowers bloom as usual after the day closes its shutters
a voice of the baul plays on the strings
of a handloom river
night comes reverently
unleashing its warmth
i sleep unlikely
in the crypt and cradle of your stars.

The life is not yet ‘stabbed’ or disjointed, narrow or fragmented, but full of harmony, rhythm and cosmic sensibility. The approach of night and darkness or the night itself is tensional, but the leaping sun brings about love and dream.

looking through a sand swept veil
a river lost to faraway clouds, faraway lands
i discovered your arching eyebrows
questioning the scarcity of valid darkness
when did the shadows arrive
when did the marble floors conspire
when did the dust settle on ancestral moments
when did you refuse to align the advent of dawn
i have no answers
i have your lips that speak of language
cajoled of hurts, gulls reined in embrace
i have the lilac sun that rose only once
a sky leaping the closeness of a dream.

The poems are characteristically love poems, or love in motion through places, in a series of tableaux. His travel down the memory lane, under the heat of summer, turns from real to surreal and even magical; as the poet reminisces the precious moments lived with his beloved. The sun, a universal symbol of life and warmth, inspires the flowering of the poet’s imagination with warmth of feeling for people and places that have grown into the texture of his very being. The tropical sun of his Calcutta days, as red as the “colour of your big bindi”, becomes a symbol of love and fulfilment, reminding us of the summer in Calcutta as experienced by Kamala Das in her extraordinary poem ‘Summer in Calcutta’. Summer in Amitabh Mitra’s poems is the unifying principle connecting not only places like Noorganj, Gwalior, Delhi, Calcutta, Johannesburg or Soweto as one place and one experience, but also connects the hearts in a bond of love and life. Mitra’s book thus offers a sense of underlying unity amidst all the diversity of feeling, form and experience of life.

Poets Printery Publishing South Africa
ISBN13 -9780620444705

Bishnupada Ray teaches English literature at the North Bengal University in Darjeeling, India. A widely published poet, he is a Pushcart nominee of 2009.

a rustic sun
in stealth
catches
tembeka
through stained glass windows
droplets of green
turns
day
into deeper shades
of a lingering smile

First published at AmitabhMitra @ Blogspot

Popular novelist and a close friend Shreekumar Varma writes on the ups and downs in the world of books of 2009

Coming in the wake of terror and violence, meltdowns of various kinds, this year too carried the stains and strains, the echoes of the year gone by. Literature was solace as well as a reflection of a grim reality, finds Shreekumar Varma

It’s easy at first to choose between landscapes. Seaside, mountain, forest and hot plains. But as you pile up advantage and disadvantage, the memories of holidays and previous excitements — the push of salted breeze, the mix of sweat and cold as you climb, the delicious fear of unseen eyes beyond that drapery of greenery, the vastness of an empty land where the sense of your bearings gets gradually garbled — you wonder if it’s all that easy after all.

For preferences are coloured by memory and the current state of mind. By what we think we ought to like. And the subtle pressures exercised by others on our behalf.

Further reading, click here

I interviewed Shreekumar in this article, Royal Heritage, A Legacy in Poetry

First published in Deccan Herald and Boloji.com

A Hudson View, print international poetry journal is out.
Among others, we are proud to have the poetry of Naomi Nkealah, Hugh Hodge, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Kartika Budhwar and Sunil Sharma.
Printed in A4 size with a 350 GSM cover and back, this 86 page book is available from me. The journal is listed in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other reputed online book sellers.

Hudson Cover

Hudson Back

Poetry of Mxolisi Nyezwa

Cape Town Book.Co.Za Meet 2009

Ho Xuan Huong (1772-1822) was a Vietnamese woman poet born at the end of the Later Le Dynasty (Period 1428–1788: the greatest and longest lasting dynasty of traditional Vietnam) who wrote poems with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic undertones for her time. She is considered as one of Vietnam’s greatest poets, such that she is dubbed “the Queen of Nom Poetry” and has become a cultural symbol of Vietnam. I came across her name first in a travel guide where one of her poems was listed. It led me to search more of her poems. It was a sheer delight to read her poems in the book titled “Spring Essence”, which is what her name means in Vietnamese language.

The epoch she lived was marked by calamity and social disintegration. A concubine, although a high-ranking one, Ho Xuan followed Chinese classical styles in her poetry, but preferred to write poetry in an extinct ideographic script known as Nom, similar to Chinese but representing Vietnamese. And while her prosody followed traditional forms, her poems were anything but conventional: Whether mountain landscapes, or longings after love, or apparently about such common things as a fan, weaving, some fruit, or even a river snail, almost all her poems were double entendres with hidden sexual meaning.
Further reading of her sensual poetry, please click on this Boloji.com link

With the kind permission from www.boloji.com and the author P.G.R. Nair

For me these poems are closures
They sort of conclude me
Though some of them like suicide bombers
May explode in your vicinity

Dilip Chitre September 17, 1938 - December 10, 2009

your poems
can never be closures
nor even you
your words have crept slowly
on a stranger noon
when the mind slept
of indian summers
you left the doors open
hot wind blew in
you shaped the sky broken from collisions
you shaped the traffic jam at longnightend
you shaped the maddening rain to errant disclosures
they exploded
when a smile
strayed to many a horizon
to many a death threat
of a sudden
sun.

Poem and Drawing by Amitabh Mitra

Dilip Chitre passed away on 10 December 2009. One of the greatest of all Indo- English poets, I knew him as Chitre Sahab. He hated the word ’sahab’ but Dilip Chitre undoubtedly remains the sahab of Indo-English Poetry.

One of Dilip Chitre’s poem

Father Returning Home

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.

Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

The Best of Cape Town street music brought to you by Amitabh Mitra (see a snap of myself and the musicians at 2:12):

• mitramitabh TV

Aaj ki raat bahut garam hawa chalti hai
Aaj ki raat na neend aayegi - Kaifi Aazmi

Tonight a very hot wind is blowing
Tonight I won’t be able to sleep - Kaifi Aazmi

On the first anniversary of Mumbai Massacre, listen to the poetry recited by renowned super star Amitabh Bachchan. The video has an English translation.

A Slow Train to Gwalior
Love Poems of Amitabh Mitra
Publisher – Poets Printery, South Africa
ISBN 13 – 9780620428323
Price – Rand 550 including priority postage
Coffee Table Hard Cover Book with a Jacket Edition printed in full color on premium paper
Can be had from amitabh@amitabhmitra.com

‘A Slow Train to Gwalior’ is a collection of love poems and drawings by Amitabh Mitra.

The book opens with lines from Pritish Nandy’s Lonesong Street -

What happens when the letters stop
The empty mailbox stares at you
What happens when you drive alone
The tired highway leers at you…

The poet peacefully dwells in the angst-ridden reality and brings out the joy and beauty of living with his outstanding sense of aesthetics and his robust sense of hope. For me they are belle-letters and are vibrant depictions of moments lived in despair, surmounted with the conviction of achieving an unsurpassed love, which he searches in the nooks and crannies of everyday existence, his Gwalior.

For me his poetry is pure delight and the reason is because he doesn’t hide his quest for love with clichéd jargons … he just lets his words flow with his heart and he allows them to ‘travel all the way over a thought on a flutter of an eye…’

He watches his ‘Gwalior’ with ageless eyes and it comes galloping … slowing down at nostalgic lanes, by-lanes; taking lazy turns by the forts, wheat-fields, bazaars; stopping by at every familiar frame ‘searching for the hidden rain’….

This “Slow Train to Gwalior” is like Gwalior itself, a symbol of easeful life fleeting past a string of exteriors each of whose inside is an independent world loosely hanging like clusters of dreams. Dr. Amitabh Mitra has strewn them with painless words.

These are belle-letters, love-poems or love-songs whatever one may call them and could easily be sang with the accompaniment of a harp or a tambourine … they are lyrical ballads telling tales of eternal life, love and nature with an immensely contemporary idiom …

‘a single drop of rain on
your eyelid
that fell through time
letting you know of
the quiver in my
heart’

The illustrations are equally poetic. The colors as well as the form evolve a dreamlike open-ended-ness, inspiring in a multi-layered thematic movement within an apparently simplistic style. The bold innocent lines journey towards a destination that is farfetched yet real … these opposing strains lend to the paintings that essential poetic fervor, which is most needed in order to constantly match the realistic-nostalgia of these poems.

Dr. Mitra has definitely succeeded in vanishing the thin line between poetry and painting. As we journey in the slow train through the painted tracks and gray sky towards a destination that signifies hope, fulfillment and everything that is ‘Gwalior’ we realize that we have merged with the mental colors and the visual abstractions …

‘i always believed in this train
that stole our thoughts
and traded them with
hopes’

There is an easeful passage of colors and contours of a smoking engine passing through austere thoughts into the innermost caverns of human consciousness and coming out through the dark tunnels into the surface of expressions where the poet becomes the painter with words dwelling on the realm of magical realism…

‘and I wondered only if
the train had such windows
where the sky would creep in
and flood us
the desert outside would never be the same’

The most charming aspect of the book is the consistency of the theme that runs smoothly throughout the book, right from the beginning to the end. We are led into the path of a quest for Love. As we journey with the poet on his slow train, we become part of all those fragmentary moments with the poet himself and along with him we ‘grasp the few grains of the storm outside…’

The solitary rickshaw waiting for someone unknown is a recurring image that takes us back to the sepia coloured past and so are the ‘trees that run with us’ along the miles we travel together with desperate thoughts of love and togetherness waiting for a ‘promised rain’. History leaps out from the forts and caves with

‘… hordes of Maratha warriors
cascading behind a broken window
hunting relentlessly
for stolen
moments’….

As the scene changes to the ‘wintry old Delhi’ it brings back in mind those years gone by, riding steadily on an old-fashioned rickshaw and the glimpses of the fleeting past freeze on ink and paper with Amitabh’s detailed nuances of a time lived in quest for the intangible …

‘… haunted
i see you turn around
suddenly
catching the freeze
in your grip
as the rickshaw
catches another lane
another city
in wintry
old Delhi’

While he watches his timeless love gliding picturesquely through history’s eternal flow, he is also aware of the movement of time and the dimensions it curves within the mortal seasons….

‘your garara emblazoned
with fire drops on a street of Gwalior
i found you treading nimbly
on an afterthought of swept empires
in the reign of a mortal season …’

The whitewashed mosques, chador, durgah appear as recurring images in a way that is most fanciful as well as historic ….

‘loving was a
sweeping feel
of the chador
of the unspoken
of the durgah that
day’

Time moves on as the engine crawls from one scene to the other and Amitabh’s reverie takes a pensive turn as he ruminates upon the calligraphic inscriptions on minarets and tombs, which seem to mourn the lost glory of the bygone days …

Nostalgia sweeps him off as he recalls the kite-covered sky … now no more the same…

‘a kite, its paper melted away
hangs on the parapet’

The narrative shifts to an evening that ‘had grown from many a summers’ and the poet hears ‘a voice invisible had crept on to the marble of shades tiled in fervour …’ he also recalls an instinctive evening when …

‘…There would be an evening
I would hold my cheeks
On the cold metal’

The most fascinating aspect of Amitabh’s poetry is his narrative style…it is deeply touching. In all his works he weaves a narrative that jumps chronological barriers and to some extent the geographical barriers too…. so much so that there is always an uninhibited flow of images throughout.

‘qawallis pour in under the door
the durgah splashes its
midnight loudspeakers…

Or…

‘nizamuddin reeks of a dust filled stare
in a July Delhi
where you once stopped suddenly
and asked me of
ruins, ravens and our love
that might rest there
one day’

These images speak volumes about Amitabh’s understanding of the universality of history … anywhere, everywhere …

Just to refer to another poem from another collection of Amitabh’s works … the lines below do not restrict themselves to Mdantsane only, these children could be from any nation battling for a square meal …

‘mdantsane children take to the streets
happiness is as hungry
a barren sky chides of dreams
the sun looks down
guilty
till
proved
dishevelled laughter
rules’
(from Mdantsane)

…… the poem below is another example of Amitabh Mitra’s unique narrative style…

‘nobody knew
who stabbed him at his back
he came to the hospital
with a knife protruding
the mdantsane sky was lashed in two
its anger held the knife
while it rained outside
puddles
grew
in shame
as usual.’
(from Mdantsane)

In the current collection ‘A Slow Train to Gwalior’ the poet is always positively conscious about the presence of absence. The entire charm is about capturing this ‘absence’ throughout the narrative and Amitabh does this without letting the poems degenerate into a series of melancholic reflections…

‘and many trees grew around the gates
in your absence and even invaded the path
crawling lucidly to reclaim a once perfect day
the door majestic stood ramrod cracked
mirrors had stopped
seeing long back
and the smell… yes perhaps
there is a remnant of you there
just the miniscule of that sweet
strangeness’

The poems could have become morbid and cold without the essential glint of hope and optimism that runs parallel to his nostalgia. Amitabh has garbed his poems with this satin silk feeling of warmth that perpetuates a sense of eternity in the temporal world ….
‘but our shadows
would stretch
to this river bank
to this fatigued sky
to this ever running train
to you
and me
forever’

What one gathers after reading these poems is that these are sufficiently capable of standing the test of time without the support of the illustrations, which are of course independently alive in their own way …

I wouldn’t say that this book would be better without the illustrations keeping in mind that the illustrations are meant to complement the poems, which they really do …
But I really feel that the poems are strong enough to stand on their own, anytime.
As a coffee table book this would earn accolades for sure, but these poems are for me much more than just coffee-time reading….

About Nibedita Sen -
I have done a masters’ degree in English Literature from Calcutta University … Have written for newspapers. Have had exhibitions of my paintings in Calcutta and Germany … Have acted in a Bangla film…. also worked as a Creative art therapist with the Spinal Injured Patients (Delhi) … Worked with blind children (NAB, Delhi) as a rehabilitation professional …. worked with sexually abused children (Udayan Care, Delhi) …