Being brought up in a palpably Catholic household, the word mystery has echoed within me ever since I was a little boy. The mystery of the oneness of the Trinity and the mystery of the Sacraments among others. Over the years, I did go through my own interpretations of the existence of the word mystery […]
I was watching the news on a regional channel recently when the ticker below declared that Tomas ‘Transformer’ had won the Nobel Prize. This sudden transformation of Transtromer did bring on a smile, but it also reminded me of the kind of effect the poetry of this man had on me when I stumbled upon […]
I am waiting for the doctor at the clinic. There’s something quite transitory about this room itself. As if the collective anxiety of people who have waited here for years have crystallized into invisible stalactites of fear. I think of all the pointless waiting. Prisoners waiting to be gassed, murderers to be electrocuted and couples […]
Like monsoons in March, I am writing again. Happily out of season. I remember reading Celan’s Deathfugue for the first time many years ago. I did not know what to do with it. Like a funeral procession passing by my window on a monochrome evening, I watched it go by. I looked up from the […]
Everything I remember in life revolves around forgetting. Pencils, erasers, books, keys, friends, poems and things of every conceivable kind. With apologies to M. Proust, here’s to forgetfulness. Pens: I have always had an almost fanatic fascination for pens – and an equally unfathomable talent for losing them at regular intervals. I distinctly remember a […]
Recently, I ran into John at the airport. He seemed to be having a severe attack of writing; more intense than anything I remember him having any time recently. I had caught him in the middle of a week long writing break from work. So we started off on writing – and in a few […]
I once read about how the insight that wheels limit speed became a revolutionary concept in the world of terrestrial travel. Thus today we have bullet trains without wheels that ride on magnetically created cushions of air, almost completely eliminating the resistance of friction. The greatest invention in travel, thus seems to have become its […]
“No man who’s shot a rifle at his fellow men can look at these properly”, says Gomez the painter as he refuses to look at the paintings in the Museum of Modern Arts, in Sartre’s Iron in the Soul. Surrounded by the mushrooming impact of World War II, he instinctively feels that he is part […]
I picked this expression up from an address that Paul Farley made at the Griffin Poetry Awards. He seems to have got it from a poet who in turn remembers hearing it from another poet. If it has passed around so much among poets, I assume that this expression, to an extent encapsulates the vulnerability […]
As I run through the platform to catch the evening train, I am thinking of two poets. I who have just stepped out of a meeting on the impact of financial downturn on the advertising budgets am now thinking of poets, exile and Palestine. I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as […]
