Poets are always best at their craft when they leap to the magical imagination to elevate readers to new perceptions and milieu related to meaning and experience. Like the publisher-poet of this book, Jamie McGarry, I found the poem ‘The Lesson’, more akin to an opening overture of this collection, candidly meeting this benchmark. Through this poem, Saleem Peeradina’s savoir-faire as a poet successfully takes us on that enchanted journey to deliver us to the experience of things beyond a materialistic tuning.
Take a sheet of paper the size of a drawing pad. The universe,
as we perceive it, must be accommodated within the borders of this rectangle.
And you are launched. The poet then guides us to populating this suggested universe framed in a rectangle. The child in you has to conjure up the image of the Earth as a marble or he has to get messy with ‘thumbing in a smudge to mark the Milky Way’ only to remind us further:
But you are not done yet. Fold this sheet to fashion an origami pigeon and release this messenger bird into the sky.
After vanishing into the flock of ‘billions of other winged creatures, each carrying its own universe’, we are tossed into the neorealism that will follow in the collection later on in the form of objects occupying our ambience made quite clear in the lines, ‘We have to make the journey back to reclaim the Earth’ and ‘seeking solace in myths will get us nowhere.’ This poem on its own can be viewed as a gateway to the other poems that follow and unfold themselves—the poet only capturing that poetical act — as an earthly experience. It will be the undoing of the ‘crumpled paper’ ball of the Earth because we will have to explore things—making a journey ourselves—unfolding the reality of the stars of our own surroundings, our own universe.