Creative collaborations of any sort are both demanding and nourishing. Demanding because you are no longer governed by your own creative chaos alone. Instead, you display a certain kind of altruism as you put your collaborator ahead of you, trying to understand and respond to her. And this is also why it is a nourishing experience.
All the Worlds Between is a collaborative poetry project between India and Ireland. Edited by K. Srilata and Fióna Bolger, the book is an engaging and earnest attempt to bring unusual poetic partnerships together.
In the introduction, ‘Curious Synchronicity’, the editors explain how this book attempts to break the cliché of writers working in solitude, of writing being “a solitary business”.
Experience the risk
And though quite often we dialogue with writers who have lived before us, with the legacy of their words, rarely do we ‘connect’ with contemporaries through our own work. At literature festivals, we listen to each other read. Now what happens when we ‘work’ and ‘speak’ to each other in verse? Especially when the other is someone we have never met? The project is ambitious and risky in many ways. However, like all great adventures, this is a risk worth experiencing.
The poets who have come together include Adil Jussawalla and Sue Butler, Aditi Rao and Özgecan Kesici, Alvy Carragher and Shobhana Kumar, Anne Tannam and K. Srilata, BeRn and R. Vatsala, Chris Murray and Menka Shivdasani, Daniel Ryan and Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Arundhathi Subramaniam and Fióna Bolger, Maurice Devitt and Nandini Sahu, Nita Mishra and Rizio Yohannan Raj, Sampurna Chattarji, Áine Ni Ghlinn and Claus Ankersen.
There are four strands brought forth by the partnerships: “poems as conversations, poems at angles to one another, poems which speak out of turn to other poets in the group and, not surprisingly, stories of friendship,” states the blurb. To the reader: don’t go looking for poems or poets neatly arranged according to themes. There is chaos in this collaboration and that’s what appeals to me. Understandably, not all strands are equally powerful. But out of the themes, the strands that explore, home, belonging and identity stand out for me.
In a spot
Discovering new voices made this review all the more enjoyable. Swarnalatha Rangarajan writes in ‘A Requiem for Cartographers’: Once upon a time in the city/ When the marsh flung its long thigh over the earth,/ migratory birds thrived/ in these wet moments of intimacy…Now that the city has/ metastasised into a megapolis…/ this behemoth with an iron gut/ devours old maps and boundary markers,/ and shuts out from view/ these gentle cartographers.
In the other poems, we find an interplay of languages and dialects enriching the exploration of place and identity. The Tamil poem ‘Theydal’ is an elegant example of how Tamil allows for a no-nonsense approach to the politics surrounding the occupation of a sex-worker, and to the sensuality of a teenager. The poem has been poignantly translated as ‘I find myself still looking’ by K. Srilata:
What’s to say of the body?/ It’s a lowly creature,/ something you can live by./ What guards its gates/ can be had for a song/ at the neighbourhood store./ As for the heart,/ there are no guards yet in this world of ours/ who can stop the fragrance of a man’s breath/ from sneaking through,/ and bolting itself in.
The conversation between Sue Butler and Adil Jussawalla haunts us with its trigger points and reactions. ‘Engine trouble’ by Butler seems to be her response to Jussawalla’s ‘Underground’. To his lines, Put yourself in a spot,/ anywhere, as long as you’re in a spot. You’ll always land on the one marked X , she says, There’s no familiar judder, no hawking/ preamble to a diesel-soliloquy, just a pheasant/ alarmed by the silence. Bear with me/ while I bang my head on the steering wheel./…I set off walking, scared/ the world tried to warn/ a map would show X/ here and I should be digging.
Most books of poetry have their share of brilliance and dullness. This book too has its dull moments. The brilliance seems to come mostly from the bridges the collaboration has allowed for. Bridges that connect lands, languages, identities and all the worlds between.
An author and literary journalist, the writer’s first book of poems, Nine , was published in 2015.
All the Worlds Between; Edited K. Srilata and Fióna Bolger, Yoda Press, ₹295
