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Literary Review
A feast of poetry
FOR a literary periodical to be launched into the world of letters with the poems of 145 living poets, most of them celebrities is no small achievement. When the poets are drawn from 40 countries across the world, it becomes a matter of truly trans-national interest. The current issue of the half-yearly publication Journal of Literature & Aesthetics (www.jlaindia.com) edited by S. Sreenivasan, and published from Kerala, provides a feast of poetry to anyone who is in love with the muses. To shift the metaphor, it gives an inebriating sense of the global outpouring of poetry from countless Parnasses across the continents.
"World Poetry today no longer means Western poetry as it probably did to the generation of T. S. Eliot. The poetry in every language matters today and has a place in the expanding literary horizon," says the sprightly editorial. In keeping with this credo, the issue gathers together significant poems, mostly previously unpublished, from Asian, Latin American, African and Arabian countries as well as from Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The criteria of selection appear fluid and varied, unbiased by any particular critical dogma, and yet wary of maintaining high standards of poetic excellence.
The enormous variety and contemporaneity of themes and motifs displayed by this collection of global poetry are no less impressive than the innovative power and intensity of their poetic expression. There is charming lyricism and personal expressions of grief, guilt, vulnerability and a sense of crisis, but the dominant theme is one of concern for collapsing values in public life as in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's anguished apostrophising:
Great Oracle, sleeping through the centuries
Awaken now at last
and tell us how to save us from ourselves
and how to survive our rulers
who would make a plutocracy of our democracy.
Or in the more imaginative and metaphoric utterance of Wole Soyinka:
I'll thrust all fingers down the throat
Demosthenes
To raise a spout of bile to drown the world.
It's petrified, Demosthenes, mere rasps.
The range and quality of the poems in this impressive issue tend to create in us a persisting sense of the reality of world poetry at a time when divisive thinking dominates many fields of thought. This is one reason which makes one wish that the journal will survive.
Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Volume 1, Number 1, July-December 2001, published from Kollam, Kerala. www.jlaindia.com
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