Tag: poem

Safe Inside Old Bear: A Humm by Mawson

You guard them as they laugh and grow,
Till, big and strong and brave,
They dash off to excitements,
Without a backward wave.

They plan, they build, they fill their world,
Till one hard night they yearn,
Quite suddenly, to be safe Home.
And softly they return.

They find a place long left behind,
And through a portal peer,
But now it’s strange and different.
What they need’s no longer there.

Did someone take it all away,
When off they went to roam?
How could they go and lose it –
Their Certainty of Home?

But –
That place where all is simple,
Where all is true and dear,
That space they knew so long ago,
Is safe –
Inside Old Bear.

A Humm by Mark, Mawson Bear’s Guardian. You can listen too on Spotify.

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You are at Mark’s blog called Baffled Bear Books. Mark is a dark coffee tragic, bibliophile and Guardian of Mawson Bear, a Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears.

Subliminal Dust, by Pooja Mittal: Poetry from Odyssey Books

Silence is never silent so long as there is a listening ear. (Back cover of book.)

I have read Subliminal Dust right through four times now and I am still finding lines to enjoy afresh and differently. The poems bring out voices in movements, whispers amid chaos, sounds trapped in small rocks, the stretching voids of unspoken emotions, terribly pale silences.

There is music in this triangle, as in a shell ..

Subliminal Dust. Poetry by Pooja Mittal

Iain Sharp of The Sunday Star said of Pooja Mittal, ‘Exceptional … A voice rather like that of a Zen master – insightful and enigmatic in about equal measure’.  Zen often springs to mind on reading her poems, in particular the notion of koans.

Kōan, in Zen Buddhism of Japan, is described as a succinct paradoxical statement or question. The effort to “solve” a koan is intended to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, readying the mind to entertain an appropriate response on the intuitive level.

I don’t suggest that Mittal intended her work in quite that way but certainly her images and unexpected juxtapostions had that effect for me. They set you loose from the usual tightness of linguistic meanings and adrift into the spaces and arenas of one’s own mind.

Gentle universes that float past 
like tall, starry ships .

A favourite poem for me is ‘Seducing A Poem’ (p. 26), which so well conveys the frustrations of writers and the patience needed to bring to the fore that elusive something that you know you must write down, somehow.

.. come here poppet on little black shoes ..

Pooja Mittal has been widely published  since the age of 13. At 17 she was the youngest Featured Poety ever in Poetry New Zealand. In 2007 she was featured in The Best Australian Poetry 2007. Her work has been performed in Moscow in Russian translation.

Subliminal Dust was published 2010 published by Odyssey Books .
Where to find it: On Amazon it is only $1 to buy in digital but I recommend the Paperback so that you can dip into it off. everal outlets on Abebooks.com that also have it.