Tanya Mendonsa, the Moira (Goa) based poet will be launching her first poetry
book
"The Dreaming House" on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 7.00 p.m. at Literati
(Gauravaddo, Calangute, Bardez, Goa) You are most cordially invited.
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BOOK COVER:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/GoanetBlog/Books#5413264528826053554
About The Dreaming House ( Harper Collins ) by Tanya Mendonsa
The Dreaming House was conceived of as a journey, as much spiritual as
geographical. The first part is called The Voyage Out , and the second ,
The
Country Beyond .
The Voyage Out contains poems that are mostly about the journey from
childhood to
maturity, and my 19 years in Paris; the subjects are mostly people- whether
real or
imaginary, and wars whether historical or internal. The majority of the poems
are
unsettling, as I suppose that part of ones life always is.
The second part of the book, The Country Beyond focuses on the redeeming
qualities of the natural world, and the way it can transform human beings.
Nearly all the poems are set in the lush and watery landscape of Goa and, more
specifically, the poets village of Moira .
Many of the poems refer to actual people in the village, whether alive or dead,
as
in Miss Havisham of Moira, The Farmer Next Door , The Chatelaine of Moira
.
Many more are about the beauties of this village set between two rivers, with
its
fields and hills, forests and mussel beds, and the changing seasons reflected
by
them.
The natives of Moira, tradition has it, are a little crazy. If so, its a
lovely
place to be crazy in. The whitewashed church, built in 1636, stands high on a
plateau that looks down on a view that has remained unchanged for centuries.
Unchanged, that is, until now.
This is a world that is, literally, hanging by a thread; on the cusp of being
destroyed by the combined and greedy efforts of the building lobby in tandem
with
local officials and politicians.
All of the nature poems in The Dreaming House are suffused with the
poignancy
of intense pleasure on the edge of loss : of archetypal village life and all it
contains and means- not only to its inhabitants, but to people who encounter it
briefly, as well.
Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet who won the Nobel prize in 1945, claimed
that
lyric poetry springs from the wound of love inflicted on us by things. The
writer
Sudep Chakravarti , speaking of my work to my publisher, said, even if she
writes
about a rose, the rose will be bleeding.
When I came to live in Moira three years ago, I felt, for the first time in my
life,
that I had come home. I also discovered that my grandmothers sister had owned
much
of the land around my own house which overlooks the river which came to be a
living
presence to me.
I had written poetry all my life, in fits and starts. But from the first night
in my
old-new house, like a water source being unblocked, the words flowed onto paper
as
effortlessly as the sweet air I breathed.
A burning need to preserve the beauty around me, which was the source of my
wellbeing, was a natural corollary.
With a fellow writer in the village, Venita Coelho, and a handful of concerned
villagers who had been fighting the same fight for years already, we started a
campaign to preserve the village under the aegis of the new Regional Plan for
2021.
Our activist group mapped every heritage tree, walk, house, church, temple
or
monument. We traced the water sources and rivers, defined every green area and
gradient, and asked for planned development, no gated communities or apartment
buildings, and roads no wider than 5 metres. Venita was the spearhead and did
the
bulk of the work; I handled communications; not more than half a dozen people
worked with us.
In the end, we managed to persuade the village panchayat ( which had no
knowledge
whatsoever of what the Regional Plan meant ) to cooperate with us.
However, the rot has set in far too deep
Goa is now the most corrupt state in
India, and the TCP dept. is in the process of tampering with the plans each
village
has submitted so that they, and their political bosses, dont miss a slice of
the
cake that will be snatched away from under their eyes, if these plans are
allowed to
be ratified.
And, of course, they want to suppress any dissenting voices.
I want to use any publicity I might get for my book to make as many people as
possible aware of our battle to preserve the village. I am not alone in this,
but we
need as much exposure as we can get, and the media is the best possible tool.
If one village in Goa, and what threatens it today, gets enough exposure, this
will
help all the villages in Goa.
As the poet Hopkins said,
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness ? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
The language throughout The Dreaming House is straightforwardly lyrical,
but
completely contemporary, with unexpected twists and bites.
My work is solidly rooted in the classical tradition of W.B. Yeats, Robert
Graves,
W.H. Auden, and Wystawa Szymborska, but my affinities lie more with the nature
poets
: D.H. Lawrence, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Mary Oliver.
I am currently working on a second book of poetry, titled, None of This is
Mine .
The concluding stanza of a poem in it, called Ravisher , talks about the
effect
poetry has on me, which is what makes poetry so vital to the human spirit :
I want this wind
To rip up my sober stanzas,
To jumble up the words
So that they strike upside-down melodies
And helter-skelter rhymes.
I want this wind to hit my inner ear a powerful blow,
That shows me whos in charge.
I want this wind to skew my vision so well
That it will never recover.
I hope that my voice will be a new, strong and, ultimately, joyous one, in
praise
of what we have, even if it is to be snatched away tomorrow.
The writer Amitav Ghosh, who has a house in the neighbouring village of Aldona,
and
who has come to feel much the way I do about his village, has kindly written
a
blurb for the front cover of my book :
Tanya Mendonsa's work is cosmopolitan in reference, yet deeply rooted in the
red
earth of Goa: her Moira poems are a fitting elegy to a magical corner of a
storied
land.
Amitav Ghosh
All that I hope is that my poems become a renascence - and not an elegy, as Mr.
Ghosh fears - for the village I love so much.
The Dreaming House will also be available on Amazon.com
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About Tanya Mendonsa
Tanya Mendonsa is a poet and a painter. She graduated in English from Calcutta,
and
at 21 moved to Paris, to paint,
major in French literature at the Sorbonne and run a chaotic language school.
After
19 years in Europe, she
returned to live in the river-laced village of Moira in Goa, with the abstract
painter Antonio E Costa, two dogs and three cats. She has exhibited her
paintings
widely, but poetry is her focus. In her work, she draws deeply from a poetic
tradition of the wonders of the natural world, which illuminate her first book,
The
Dreaming House .She is currently at work on her second book of poems, None
of
this is Mine .
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\ ~/ M : +91 9975 162 897
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