Editors: Meera Chakravorty and Marcus Bussey
Authors: Meera Chakravorty, Andrea Grieder, Mythili Rao, Marcus Bussey
Pages: 72
Year of Publication: 2019
Price: Rs 250 / $15 (USD)
ISBN: 978-81-941819-1-0 (9788194181910)
 
About the Authors
Dr Meera Chakravorty is a research faculty member in the
Department of Cultural Studies, Jain University, Bangalore. She was professor in Bangalore University, 1975-2009, and member of the Karnataka State Women’s Commission. Her engagement is with Philosophy, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies and Consciousness Studies. She has translated award-winning literary works for Sahitya Akademi. She was awarded for her writing on ‘Time’ by University of Interdisciplinary Studies, Paris, and John Templeton Foundation. She has also published The Remnant Glow, Whispers from the Borrowing Wind and Gandhari and Other Poems with Writers Workshop, India.
Dr Andrea Grieder is a poet and social anthropologist, founder and director of transpoesis, an organization based in Rwanda with the aim to foster poetic expression and creativity. Her work on poetry is based on the vision that poetry is a healer and powerful source of transformation, a way of being. Originally from Switzerland, she is the Head of Department in Social Sciences and lecturer at the University of Technology and Arts of Byumba, Rwanda.
Dr Mythili P. Rao is Professor of Hindi literature and Dean of Languages, Jain University, Bangalore. She has a wide variety of expertise in literary and cultural studies.
Dr Marcus Bussey is an Australian poet and academic whose work focuses on possibility and transformation. His day job is at the University of the Sunshine Coast where he is Deputy Head, School of Social Sciences; his life work is to play, dance, dream, sing and share the joys of spirit with others.
About the Book
In their preface to the book, Dr Chakravorty and Dr Bussey write:
“… poetic reflection has its own magic, shaking up the real and presenting new ways of seeing and responding to the world.
In this book we bring together four different, yet surprisingly complementary poets, who each capture this magic in their own way. Meera Chakravorty pulls together a lifetime of travel to different cultural spaces trying to remain in humility, meeting people of varied talents from different parts of the world to gain from their fascinating wisdom that which would act as her pole star forever. She acknowledges that dreams harness and shape our unconscious desires to inspire us to be hopeful and tranquil even when some people want to seek a harbour to further the fear of violence. But even to this sea of violence poetry is the pretty coastline.
Whilst Andrea Grieder, from Switzerland, finds in poetry a way of being in the world and of expressing her inner journey, in particular the experiences of her life in Rwanda, Mythili Rao, from Jain University in Bengaluru, explores the world as an inner landscape. For her the poem is an artistic expression of even the most mundane events of our daily lives. Perhaps this is the reason that poets who dabbled with realism preferred to use the medium of this aesthetic expression, so much so that even their prose expressions were very poetic! As she says, “These words have been hiding within me, teasing me to bring them out since quite some time. A humble attempt to connect with myself.”
Finally, Marcus Bussey from Australia works between the mythic spaces of his Anglo-Saxon and Eurasian pasts and the concerns and struggles of modern Australia. For him poetry is always a journey worth taking, between matters both mundane and mystical.
Read together this collection presents the reader with a journey, a series of lyric dreams, in which the reader’s heart is the destination. Alternatively, dipped into for solace or reflective space, this collection provides a rich array of settings for a moment of stillness and sustenance in our busy world.”
Contents
Preface / 9
Watercolours by Meera Chakravorty / 11
10 poems
Sparkles of Light by Andrea Grieder / 25
8 poems
Scattered Clouds by Mythili Rao / 47
8 poems
The Certitude of Dreams by Marcus Bussey / 59
7 poems