This week I will look at poems that deal with animals, but from an unusual perspective. All three poems deal with a sense of loss, that draws our minds to rather depressing aspects of, not human, but natural, conditions.
The first is perhaps the most familiar in terms of its subject matter, and indeed looks at conditions which man has created. It is by S. Pathmanathan, translated as usual by himself, and deals with a side effect of the destruction wrought by war. The scene should be an unfamiliar one, but it has been all too common in recent years in the North, and the writer brings to the experience, of coming back home after enforced exile, a touching mixture of bewilderment and the assumption that life simply has to just go on. Continue reading
