Shakti's Words: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women's Poetry - Softcover

Mcgiford, Diane And Kearns, Judith (editors)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0920661149 ISBN 13: 9780920661147

Publisher: TSAR, 1990

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Review:

Sbakti's Words, while seemingly limited in its concentration on a particular segment of a particular ethnic group, nevertheless offers a rich and significant contribution to Canadian letters. The anthology brings together the work of eight contemporary Canadian poets, all female, and all of whom share a common South Asian background, a dual perspective that offers a rich source for literary exploration in the political and social realm. Themes of nature, always dominant in Canadian literature, are given new twists here in the female/animal identification of Suniti Namjoshi's "The Fur Seals as Shown on Television" and in Lakshmi Gill's forbidding "Letter to a Prospective Immigrant." The female perspective itself is a complicated one, and the ambivalences of family guilt and loyalty, wifely devotion and despair are powerfully rendered in Himani Bannerji's "Wife" and Namjoshi's "In Those Early Photographs" ("But in our long ancestry/Where are the women?"). Most poignant is the juxtaposition of pain and ecstasy, grief and fulfillment portrayed in Uma Parameswaran's "Usha," from the poem sequence Trisbanku, the "Nor hope nor need by certainty" of motherhood and its inevitable losses. Bannerji's "Aparthate" is a particularly biting example of the political injustice felt perhaps more acutely by the marginalized immigrant and certainly so by the historically subjugated female. Lakshmi Gill's "Me" and "Beneath the Purple Lantern" give further voice to the horrors of discrimination and hypocrisy on both personal and national levels.What is perhaps most striking about this unusual collection is the extraordinary range of voice to be found among and even within the works of individual poets. The vivid experimentation, for example, of Lakshmi Gill's "Klee Symphony" and "Fredericton Highway Bridge" is effectively balanced by the more traditional, myth-laden narratives of Suniti Namjoshi's "Snapshots of Caliban" and "Caliban's journal." Its diversity of poetic form, its wide-ranging scrutiny of political, environmental, and domestic concerns, conveyed in the "intriguingly different" female voice, all combine to make Shakti's Words an important addition to any collection of modem Canadian verse. -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: TSAR
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0920661149
• ISBN 13: 9780920661147
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 92