Cirrus@Austlit

'The collaborative work consisting of corresponding poems between an Adelaide-based poet Arnis Silvia and a Prayagraj-based poet Susheel Sharma deals with anthropological phenomena like identity, ecological awareness and social justice. Taking the geographical background in both resident cities, the six pairs of poems reflect on how both the poets understand the world around them along with its impact on them personally and socially. The poets have employed some principles of duoethnography in their poetic conversations by dialoguing themselves with another self, with another context of culture, tradition, values, histories and meaning-making (Sawyer & Norris 2012). The authors have attempted to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and have tried to see the world through their and others’ eyes to better understand the reality(ies) that were portrayed in the poems. The authors have discovered that despite their geographical and cultural differences, they share many similarities in terms of the issues they deal with daily; they struggle with their selves to make sense of the world and they reflect on realities in their surroundings to understand them better.' (Publication abstract)

'Poet Paul Celan speaks of a poem as ‘a message in a bottle’ washing up on ‘heartland’ (2001: 396). This idea is indeed a poignant one for our times, and for the estrangement as well as strangeness being experienced (at the time of writing) as a result of ‘lockdown’, ‘selfisolation’, and ‘social distancing’. But how can it shape the development of poetries between India and Australia? Celan’s notion has a timelessness and universality, based as it is on an intensely dialogical poetics. As this paper attempts to show, the nuances of this poetics become increasingly pertinent to this exchange between Kolkata-based academic Sharmila Ray, and myself, Perth-based poet Mags Webster. It has been, for me, an exercise in seeking poetic and ontological common ground. I discuss how, prompted by Ray’s epistolatory approach to her home city of Kolkata, I came to interrogate more deeply, in my responses and through my thinking, notions around not only the ‘to whom’ of the poem, but also, and perhaps more importantly for this particular project, the ‘about whom’' (Publication abstract)