Bridging Connections – Death as an Abstract Concept in Poetry

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Bridging Connections, Channels, Cheran, Death, English Writers Cooperative, Gunadasa Amerasekera, Poetry, Rex Baker, Too Old For Tears

Bread and Scythe (1993) – Elsie Russell

To say something new or striking about Death as an abstract concept is not easy for a poet. It has long been a subject of poetry, along with the inevitable passing of time and the approach of death.

The three poems published here this week all however have something unusual about them, which I believe well worthy of special notice.

Rex Baker was British Council Representative in Sri Lanka from 1984, though by the time he left in 1990 he was called a Director, and the Council had turned into a commercial outfit – though thankfully that did not prevent at least a couple of his successors from taking forward also the altruistic work that had been the hallmark of the Council in the past, when wonderful characters like Bill McAlpine held sway.

Lakmahal 10 – Opening Doors: The World Outside

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Bandaranaike, Colombo, Dudley Senanayake, Hope Todd, Kalyani Rajasooriya, Lake House, Lakmahal, Philip Gunewardena, Ralph Deraniyagala, Stanley Tillekeratne, Wijayananda Dahanayake

Old Parliament - Colombo

When Hope was in Colombo, his hours at the Tourist Board were fairly regular. This was in the mid-sixties, after my father had moved to Parliament and become Clerk to the House, the post later designated as Secretary General of Parliament. It was the period when Parliament was at its best, for you had evenly balanced teams with brilliant debaters on either side.

My father had moved there in 1963, as assistant to Ralph Deraniyagala, who had been Clerk practically since independence. Many of his friends wondered why my father took up the job, and though he took over as Clerk in 1964 even he sometimes wistfully regretted the fact that he had given up a chance to get on the bench, as a Supreme Court judge (though such regrets ceased in the eighties when it became clear that the bench was no longer what it had been, as JR tried to remould the Supreme Court in his own image).

Bridging Connections: Poetry about fish, birds and butterflies

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Angela de Silva, Cheliyan, Hemamali Gunasinghe, Poetry, Richard de Zoysa, S Pathmanathan, S Sivakumaran, Siri Gunasinghe

Many poets have written about animals, in many different ways. The first poem given here seems essentially whimsical, relating the adventures of little fish that got to land and proceeded to enjoy themselves outrageously.

Apart from flying kites, they were rumoured to have enjoyed themselves in night clubs.

The poem is translated by S Pathmanathan from an original work by Cheliyan, the pen-name of S Sivakumaran. Born in 1960, he was involved early on in Tamil politics, but left Sri Lanka in 1986 as a refugee and has lived in Canada ever since. One wonders therefore whether the fry are not a metaphor for emigrants like himself, who left a relatively simple background for the complexities of the West, and ended up dissolving ‘their hearts in the frothing beer… weeping on the banks of the Thames’. Be that as it may, the poem is immensely engaging.