There is a considerable diversity of theme in this collection of poems. They reflect the author's wide interests, extensive travel, and her involvement with music, and as with her prose writing, they invite the reader to ponder on the infinite resources of human experience.
As a student Margaret Chatterjee read Modern Greats (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford where she was awarded an exhibition at Somerville College. The background of her studies was always history. Subsequently she did intensive research on Gandhi's life and thought on which she has published eight books. Opportunities for teaching at university level in several countries brought her in contact with people from many cultures. She became increasingly interested in the life stories of those she met and her recent work recognises the stress on particular events and directions of change which historians perforce deal with in their own discipline, but maintains that it is most important to bear in mind the human interactions which take place between people regarded as ordinary but whom she believes are actually extraordinary.
Some comments made by Thomas Hardy in his Apology which prefaces his Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)* express cannily what has haunted me in putting this collection of poems together. He refers to 'the chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various characters like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each other An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires... But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with effors so diverse.'
I encountered these wise remarks after I had already attempted to arrange my offerings. I begin with place, go on to time especially mortality, this being followed by Jewish themes, and I close with more light-hearted ones, hoping to entertain, raise a laugh or two so as to balance the sadness which weighs down some of the earlier items. Yet I cannot but be considerably consoled by the thought that my apprehensions are in tune with Hardy's Apology, for he writes about a landscape with which I am so familiar, the green hills and valleys, woods and heath-land of Dorset where I spent my childhood.
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist