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  The Poetry of Sarojini Naidu -...

  Sarojini Naidu

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  Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born into a Bengali family in Hyderabad, India on 13th February 1879, the eldest of the eight siblings. The family was well-respected in Hyderabad and were established artists. 
   
  Naidu passed her matriculation examination at the University of Madras and took a four-year break from her studies.  
   
  In 1895, H.E.H. the Nizam's Charitable Trust founded by the 6th Nizam, Mahbub Ali Khan, gave her the chance to study in England, first at King's College, London and later at Girton College, Cambridge.  
   
  Even in these early times she was a social activist.  It was whilst in England that she worked as a suffragist and was first drawn to the Indian National Congress' Hindu movement for India's independence from British Colonial rule.  
   
  She began writing at the age of twelve. Her play, ‘Maher Muneer’, written in Persian, impressed the Nawab of Hyderabad. It was an auspicious start. 
   
  Sarojini met Paidipati Govindarajulu Naidu, a physician, and after finishing her studies at age 19 married him. The couple would have five children.  Interestingly their families approved their marriage even though they were from different castes and society was not as tolerant as it might be today.  Additionally, Sarojini was from Bengal and Naidu from Andhra Pradesh and marriages between those from the north and south were frowned upon.  Happily, they overcame these problems and both marriage and careers thrived. 
   
  In 1905, her first collection of poems, ‘The Golden Threshold’ was published. 
   
  Naidu became a part of the Indian nationalist movement and was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and his idea of swaraj (this was an India without its colonial administration systems).  Despite her growing political career she still found time to write and published several further volumes of poetry. Such was her eloquence that she became known as the ‘Nightingale of India’. 
  Sarojini was appointed the President of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and was a major influence and figure in the Independence movement.  
   
  Along with several other Congress leaders including Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru she was arrested for taking part in the 1930 Salt March.  Indeed Sarojini faced frequent arrest by the British Authorities and spent, in total, many months in prison. 
   
  Following India's independence from British rule in 1947, Sarojini was appointed as the governor of the present-day Uttar Pradesh in so doing she became India's first female governor. 
   
  Returning from work in New Delhi on 15th February, 1949 she was advised to rest by her doctors, and her official engagements were cancelled.  Her health deteriorated rapidly and on 1st March bloodletting was performed after she complained of severe headache.  
   
  Sarojini Naidu died of a cardiac arrest on 2nd March 1949.  She was 70.

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  Poetry Book Society Autumn 2023...

  Alice Kate Mullen

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  The quarterly poetry magazine of the Poetry Book Society, founded by T.S. Eliot, featuring poems, reviews and exclusive interviews from Choice Poet Daljit Nagra and Recommended poets Mary Jean Chan, Jen Campbell, Terrance Hayes, Jacqueline Saphra, Mary Oliver, Lutz Seiler, and Stefan Tobler.

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  Sonny Sunshine

  Beat Poet Experience

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  Sonny Sunshine the new Album by the Beat Poet Experience is formed around the poetry and dynamism of performance artist David O'Kelly. Paying more than a passing nod to the Beat Poets of the 60's it embraces warmly all that we love and hate about ourselves with a wry twist of phrase and some of the hottest jazz licks this side of New Orleans ...Reflecting the major works of Beat writing ALA Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the Beat Poet Experience joins these members of the Beat Generation as one of the new bohemian hedonists celebrating nonconformity and spontaneous creativity. 
  The album Sonny Sunshine includes songs, lyrics and poems that have been written and performed over the last two decades in New York, Prague and London. It is Beat Poetry with an English twist and an eye to the odd crazy frailty of human nature with incredible performances from some of the best players currently on London's vibrant jazz scene. Written with a wry turn of Phrase and a sharp observational eye these are poems about life, death and magic.

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  The Poetry of Edith Wharton -...

  Edith Wharton

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  Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York on 24th January 1862.   Born into wealth, this background of privilege gave her a wealth of experience to eventually, after several false starts, produce many works based on it culminating in her 1921 Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘The Age of Innocence’ 
   
  Marriage to Edward Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior in 1885 seemed to offer much and for some years they travelled extensively.  After some years it was apparent that her husband suffered from acute depression and so the travelling ceased and they retired to ‘The Mount’, their estate designed by Edith.  By 1908 his condition was said to be incurable and prior to divorcing Edward in 1913 she began an affair, in 1908, with Morton Fullerton, a Times journalist, who was her intellectual equal and allowed her writing talents to push forward and write the novels for which she is so well known.  
   
  Acknowledged as one of the great American writers Wharton was also a dazzling though largely unrecognised poet.  Her talents allowed her to create poems that both capture and explore many situations of life and society.  
   
  Edith Wharton died of a stroke in 1937 at the Domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, in France. 
   
  1 - The Poetry of Edith Wharton - An Introduction 
  2 - Terminus by Edith Wharton 
  3 - Some Busy Hands by Edith Wharton 
  4 - A Failure by Edith Wharton 
  5 - A Hunting Song by Edith Wharton 
  6 - Happiness by Edith Wharton 
  7 - Mould and Vase by Edith Wharton 
  8 - Jade by Edith Wharton 
  9 - Aeropagus by Edith Wharton 
  10 - Non Dolet by Edith Wharton 
  11 - Botticlelli’s Madonna in the Louvre by Edith Wharton 
  12 - Patience by Edith Wharton 
  13 - The Comrade by Edith Wharton 
  14 - Mona Lisa by Edith Wharton 
  15 - Life by Edith Wharton 
  16 - The Bread of Angels by Edith Wharton 
  17 - Chartres by Edith Wharton 
  18 - Survival by Edith Wharton 
  19 - All Saints by Edith Wharton 
  20 - All Souls by Edith Wharton 
  21 - The Young Dead by Edith Wharton 
  22 - Belgium by Edith Wharton 
  23 - Battle Sleep by Edith Wharton 
  24 - Experience by Edith Wharton 
  25 - A Torchbearer by Edith Wharton 
  26 - A Grave by Edith Wharton 
  27 - An Autumn Sunset by Edith Wharton 
  28 - Grief by Edith Wharton

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  Sea Things

  Hassan Abdulrazzak

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  A bold and startling comic thriller about climate crisis, conspiracy, and what lurks beneath the waves… 
  It's 2050 and, due to the rising sea level, a small coastal town in Britain is now underwater. Some of the town's inhabitants have taken shelter in a manor house, which has been converted into a camp for climate-change refugees. It's run by Maxscore, a shady private company.
  As they face power cuts, food scarcity and blackmail, the camp inmates start to realise that people are mysteriously disappearing. A strange force has been unleashed and is set to destroy them. Can they stop it before it's too late?
  Hassan Abdulrazzak's play Sea Things was first performed at Southwark Playhouse, London, in a production by Oxford School of Drama.
  The Nick Hern Books Multiplay Drama series features large-cast plays specifically written to be performed by and appeal to young people. For more information, visit www.multiplaydrama.co.uk.

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  A Gateway Has Opened

  Liam Blackford

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  A Gateway Has Opened is a poetry collection by Hong Kong-based poet, LIAM BLACKFORD, containing 36 missives on truth and reality, anger and rage, complexity and change, and power as manifested in people, corporations, governments, borders and cultures. The poems inhabit a chaotic and psychedelic world where water flows into the sky, nightclubs have hundreds of floors and where banks and malls publish theories on knowledge and personhood. Therein, human society is fraught with harm and violence but also euphoric with the widening horizons of possibility. The collection is notable for its strict adherence to a unique poetic form (each poem has six stanzas, each stanza with six lines, and each line with six syllables), which in its red-eyed absoluteness suggests that the poems are giving voice to an alien, an angel or a machine. Though avant-garde and philosophical, the collection is highly reflective of the poet’s place and time, in which Hong Kong is at the epicentre of epochal political and cultural change. 
  “The poems ... ‘quiver with tension’ as the speaker straddles the liminal space between dreams and the mundane.” —Ryan Fenton. “In Blackford’s verse, one is in our world, with its political and environmental anxieties, with its affluence and parallel unease.”―Andrew S. Guthrie, Proverse Prize Finalist 2013. “... what bubbles beneath the surface is the courage to find astounding beauty and inspiration amidst confounding and cruelty, and hold them both.” —Jack Mayer, Winner of the Proverse Prize 2019. “...unique explorations of poetic form.”—Philip Mead, Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia.  “Blackford’s worlds are jarring and harsh; psychedelic yet pungent with our reality. His strict form is muscular and fascinating. Gateway seethes with energy – I loved it.”―David West, Western Australia.

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