Last Tuesday I performed a set of poems in Dhaka, Bangladesh and 3 days later read more poems at The Turner Contemporary Gallery as part of the Margate Bookie Festival. A tiny glimpse of the jet-setting life!
My grateful thanks goes to Bengali poet Aminur Rahman, who rustled up a venue, audience and the kindest of welcomes for me and my husband. We were in Dhaka for the funeral of my father-in-law, Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, who is hugely respected in Bangladesh as a poet, journalist, and hero of the 1971 war of liberation. It was lovely to catch up with some of the poets I met in 2019 when we performed at venues across the city. These included Shakhib Lohani, Ayesha S Chowdhury, Jahidul Huq, and Mohammad Nurul Huda.
The latest issue of The Dhaka Review, edited by Aminur Rahman, was also launched, with articles or poems by a host of respected Bengali poets, plus international writers including Fiona Sampson, Agnes Meadows, Isabel White, Ali al-Shalha, Annabel Villar, Julio Pavanetti, Claire Booker and Tobias Burghardt.
Tributes to Abdul Gaffar Choudhury included a beautiful rendition of his song of liberation, and poems specially written to commemorate him.
Touching down at Heathrow after a 14 hour flight (including breath-taking vistas of Sylhet’s endless horizons of water) I had only one day to recover, before heading off for Margate. What a joy when I arrived to find poetry friends, old and new, in the magnificent modernism of the Turner Gallery.
Here we are, ready to perform our poem +1 from the latest issue of 14 magazine, edited by Richard Skinner, curtesy of Margate Bookie’s creator and man about the pumps, Andreas Loizou.
Poets included Jill Abram, Clare Best, Claire Booker, Angus Carlyle, James Coghill, Kaylen Forsyth, Christopher Hamilton-Emery, Caroline Maldonado, Jess Mookherjee, Kathy Pimlott, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, Emma Simon, Tamar Yoseloff, plus four women poets supported by Community Action Sutton (Fay Chung, Beverley Dixon, Elizabeth Mudyiwa, and Nali Patel).
Copies of series Two, issue 2 of 14 magazine are available from https://richardskinner.weebly.com/14-magazine.html
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