Sonata for Four Hands

Amarjit Chandan is an amazing poet, imprisoned in solitary confinement for two years as a younger man, he's lived in this country for a long time, working tirelessly for the literary and the wider communities and writing in English and Punjabi and trying to discover linguistic bridges between the two. His book Sonata For Four Hands, published by Arc, is well worth getting hold of.

The wonder of Chandan's poetry is to present the Punjabi language in its innate simplicity. It transcends experience.

Amarjit Chandan's poetry transports its listeners or readers into an arena of timelessness. What he does is to fold time; time in his poems becomes like an arras or a hinged screen. The listener or reader is encircled by a multiplicity of times. His poetic practice assumes that there are more space-time dimensions than the four we habitually recognise. ... Each of Chandan's poems proceeds in its own way and has its own form. Yet in all of them there is an assembly of different space-time dimensions.

There is a silence in Chandan's poetry — a deep sense of the unspoken, and more accurately, the unspeakable. ... Words here are precarious and makeshift signposts in a vast hinterland of memory. They do not seek to tame silence; merely make a fragile truce with its unmappability.