AustLit

'This collection of poems is a gesture of cross-cultural response that seeks to explore the relationship between place and displacement in the work of two poets, Bishnupada Ray from North Bengal, India and Dominic Symes from Adelaide, Australia. Ray’s poetry examines topography as the evidence of scarring, a demonstration of the pain of displacement. Pilgrimage is a strong link between the work of Ray and Symes, with both poets documenting their experience of travel to sites of cultural significance. Symes’ poetry shows the possibility for sites to represent a literary inheritance, tracing how poetry is able to be written into and respond to the surface of painting through ekphrasis. Irony is an important tool for both poets in approaching the spectre of colonialism and its ongoing legacy. Ray’s poetry examines the full force and significance of geography as an insight into the nature of human domination and oppression, an insight that uncovers the politics of difference in the conventional binaries like mind and body, the spiritual and the physical, and this notion of contrast (a concept held up in the light of its opposite) returns in Symes’ poetry through the image of a ‘Black Mirror’. The dark truths uncovered in these poems speak to the urgency experienced by the citizens of two countries dealing ineffectively with the climate crisis, to suggest that the suffering inflicted upon the earth is felt equally by the people who inhabit it.' (Publication abstract)