In her poem, actor and poet Anna McKelvie cleverly employs the metaphor of a boat at sea to express the difficulties, uncertainty and camaraderie experienced during the pandemic. Here, friendship triumphs over troubled waters.
Susan Wilson explores the creative space of poetry, writing through grief and loss, poetry as identity, and words as ‘the hope in brilliant darkness of a flame’.
Kashiana Singh’s tightly knit poems, ‘Kindling healing’ and ‘The night spills’, explore night and day in all their haunting nuance and mesmerising movement.
Artist Michèle Saint-Michel fuses poetry and music with news reportage in her powerful audio piece, The Immortal Charlie Parker. In it, she recounts her experience of reconnecting with a childhood friend during the early stages of the pandemic.
Sleeplessness gives way to the dreamy promise of luscious fruits, beautiful bodies and fantastical lands in Elodie Rose Barnes’ poetry, inspired, in part, by Leonora Carrington and H. D.
Susan Wilson’s poems quietly and sensitively explore the range of feelings – numbness, pain and longing – experienced after losing a loved one, enacting within their poetic structures the motions and process of grief.
Yen Ooi’s poem, ‘Mother Tongue’, is a bold and resolute response to those who project ideas onto a person’s skin and fail to see the individual for who they are, in all their cultural, linguistic and ethnic multiplicity.
In Rojbin Arjen Yigit’s powerful poem, ‘Daykêmîn (Mother)’, a child sits to dinner savouring her mother’s stories of when she first arrived in Britain and had to navigate many cultural and linguistic barriers.
In Kashiana Singh’s beautiful poem, ‘Pagri/Paggar/Pagadi/Pagg Turbans’, a father slowly folds his turban in front of his daughter, the intimate act of which is akin to the gradual unravelling of a poem.
In Nora Nadjarian’s beautiful poem, ‘Letters to Parajanov’, a speaker awaits a bird’s return with news from her homeland and recalls words lost and gained in this new ‘country’.
In our final poem from Usha Akella’s Flora and Fauna series, Pramila Venkateswaran encourages us to look upwards and contemplate the magical, ‘unseen paths’ above the terra firma.
In Shamini Sriskandarajah’s short and beautiful poem, ‘Cypress’, two people sit under the quiet warmth of a leylandii tree reflecting on past moments of togetherness.
