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The Parrot, the Horse and the Man
by Amarjit Chandan
Bilingual English / Punjabi edition
Translated by the author with Julia Casterton, Vanessa Gebbie, Ajmer Rode, Jaspal Singh, Stephen Watts and John Welch
Part of our Arc Translations series edited by Jean Boase-Beier
The Parrot, the Horse & the Man, Amarjit Chandan's second full-length collection from Arc, is every bit as compelling and memorable as his first. Here is a poet who finds beauty in the ordinary, who is able to build images of the every day into universal concepts that inspire a sense of awe. There is also a silence in Chandan's poetry, or, as the poet Arundhathi Subramanian puts it a deep sense of the unspoken... [where] words are precarious and makeshift signposts in a vast hinterland of memory.
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.
His work is marked by restraint and imaginative brilliance. [His poems] hold steady, as if written out of a still centre from which the flux of life, its richness and sorrows can be absorbed, contained — and let go.
Writing poems both in Punjabi and English, language, mother tongue, is of great importance to Amarjit Chandan; yet his use of language is unsentimental, uncluttered, and so restrained that it has a unique delicacy.
[He] has a unique sense of earthy mysticism, which I find in no other Punjabi poet.
978-1910345-24-5 pbk
978-1910345-25-2 hbk
128pp
Published November 2017
