FOR the past two decades or so, Indian-born poet, artist and medical doctor Amitabh Mitra has had an intimate relationship with the people of Mdantsane, which he has served with unflinching dedication.
Being a doctor at Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, Mitra has been a witness to how brutal township life can be – but also at times, how humane.
Poets Printery, South Africa has launched an exclusive range of shirts, ties, jackets and wall hangings depicting poetry and art of Mdantsane. This is in keeping with the marketing and promotion of my book, Mdantsane Breathing.
We are proud to present Harry Owen’s book of poems, Non Dog and Poems for Haiti, An Anthology of South African Poetry to be launched in April-May 2010.
forty thousand kilometres
parched land defying boundaries
of hunger and rights of existence
rights of a sun to drench its own
nobody talked to the broken sky
the broken heart
the broken earthen pots
once harbouring tears
instead rifle butts broke
but not the bones
nor the lame mind
and one day
at west midnapore
somebody
cut open the sun
people looked in awe
at the lame mind
corporate confines shook
on a stolen territory
a country talked
and talked.
Poem and Drawing by Amitabh Mitra
Proprietary Pains
Shaleen Singh
Publisher – Poets Printery, South Africa
Watercolor Cover by Amitabh Mitra
Price – Rand 130
I would like to deliberately skip over the linguistics and stylistics of the Japanese Haiku used and practiced by Dr. Shaleen K. Singh in an honest attempt to give a controlled release to the deluge of his formidable emotions, sentiments, and thoughts during the 13-day traditional but solemn and holistic mourning of his beloved and revered father, a dedicated English teacher and a profound scholar, in the present book, Proprietary Pains, presented in sober and graceful fascination by the wonderful poet-artist in the missionary medical practitioner, Dr. Amitabh Mitra.
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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.
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
Cover imagery from issue 1
