Cirrus@Austlit

These poems tell the story of Yashodhara, the wife of Gautama Buddha. The poetic forms used by Jaireth are those that were popular in ancient and medieval Indian, Sanskrit and non-Sanskrit literatures.

The narrative is constructed around poems about six seasons, with each season made up of six poems of fourteen lines. The season-poems follow a strict poetic structure and represent the voice of Yashodhara. Longer narrative poems interject the season-poems. The narrative poems are about the Buddha and are written in the voice of a contemporary narrator.

(Source: Author's notes in the text of Yashodhara : Six Seasons Without You and in introductory comments to the text of some of the poems that were published in Conversations : Occasional Writing from the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies vol.2 no.2 December 2001.)

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language. [from Trove]