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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 Says It Better - Poems to...

  Ellen Burstyn

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  Read by Ellen Burstyn 
  The legendary Academy Award–winning actress reflects on her love affair with poetry and makes us believers. 
  In this beautiful book, Ellen Burstyn celebrates poetic magic and shares her favorite works. Now into her nineties, Ellen reveals she had an evangelical response to learning poetry even as a child and would memorize and recite the works of Edna St Millay to envelope herself in the poet’s deeper emotional landscape. As she continued her epic rise through film and theater—eventually winning an Oscar, a Tony, a BAFTA, and an Emmy—poetry gave voice to her experience as no other literary art form could. She never went anywhere without her curated “poetry pack.” No matter where she was in the world, while waiting on set, in rehearsal, on a train, or just relaxing, she found comfort in verse. 
  For nearly nine decades, poetry has led Ellen on a life of adventure, from a pilgrimage to Rumi’s birthplace to a friendship with Maya Angelou, during which the poet read her work in Ellen’s movie trailer, to selecting the poems to join her in love, in motherhood and in grief. 
  Featuring work by W.B. Yeats, Edna Vincent St. Millay, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, William Ernest Henley, and others, Poetry Says It Better is a perfect daily companion for everyone looking to deepen and add meaning to their life experience. Throughout, Burstyn’s charming voice and luminous insights help readers meet her in this poetic celebration—soul to soul.

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  Black Rhythms Sacred Voices

  M.A. Tucker

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  In Black Rhythms, Sacred Voices, M.A. Tucker weaves a powerful tapestry of poetry that echoes with the soul of Black history, struggle, and triumph. These verses pulse with the rhythms of survival, the melodies of resistance, and the sacred voices that refuse to be silenced. 
  From the weight of ancestry to the fire of revolution, from love's quiet sanctuary to the echoes of the unspoken, this collection captures the raw beauty and unbreakable spirit of Blackness. Each poem is a hymn to those who came before us, a reckoning with the present, and a declaration of a future where our voices rise, untamed and free. A lyrical sanctuary for those who have ever felt unseen, unheard, or unheld. 
  For the ancestors. For the dreamers. For us.

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  Self-Portrait With Family

  Amaan Hyder

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  In Self-Portrait With Family, Amaan Hyder traces a personal history of family and queerness. With poems that focus on coming out, the collection depicts the relationship between a son and his parents, and an immigrant family and its community in the diaspora. Featuring snapshots of conversations across dinner tables and phone lines, Hyder's striking and beautifully precise poems bring into relief what is said and not said, the retreat from speech and the longing to hear from another.
  By turns tender and skilfully observed, this collection also looks from the family home to the individual experience of the brown queer man in public spaces, searching for intimate connection whilst experiencing discrimination. Self-Portrait With Family distinctively frames such narratives of closeness and distance, exploring a range of poetic forms to draw together intergenerational familial and gay relationships, English and Urdu, the world of the family home and the world outside of it.

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  Eye of the Beholder - Poems

  Luci Shaw

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  Luci Shaw is now 90 years old. The author of more than 35 collections of poetry and creative non-fiction over the last five decades, she describes her dedication to this art as a burden to "speak into a culture that finds it hard to listen." This collection of new poems—all composed over the last two years—is in many ways the culmination of a stunning career.   The joy and responsibility of the poet is to focus on particulars within the universe, finding fragments of meaning that speak to the imagination. Ordinary things may reveal the extraordinary for those willing to take time to investigate and ponder. In this fresh collection of poems, Luci Shaw practices the art of seeing, and then writing what she sees, realizing that beauty is often focused in the Eye of the Beholder.   Eye of the Beholder is meant to awaken in readers awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary. They will find in this collection a focus for meditation and be excited into their own imaginative writing.

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  Too Much Mirch

  Safia Khan

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  Safia Khan's Too Much Mirch dwells in the ambiguities of human relationships, exploring how people and communities can be lifted up or let down by those around them. Sharp and sensitive in their imagery, these poems apply an empathetic lens to every subject they meet – family members, bullies, a cadaver in an anatomy lesson.

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