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To Amerope and Other Poems

by Bertrand Wilson Hatia

60 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-2693; ISBN 1-4120-7796-6; US$10.28, C$11.82, EUR8.44, £5.91

Americans and Europeans,
Save your WTCs and Pentagons… Above all, your own self. To Amerope shows how you do it…

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About the Book

About the Author

Excerpts

About the Book

If anybody is looking for the kind of poetry that does not leave him staring blankly before him with a puzzled look, and bewildering as to the exact meaning of what is said in it, well, then, here is a book for him.

To Amerope and Other Poems contains poetry that expresses what I think and feel, my perceptions and responses in as unpretentious and plain a manner as matches the simplicity of its content. My sincere effort is to make my poetic endeavours pleasurable to my readers. But I leave it to the readers and critics to judge its aesthetic value. In regard to its contents, the readers will not find in it anything which is not written out of compulsion to write.

Sleeplessness is my first serious effort at writing and also my first finished work. It was written around 1995. What I failed to describe before a doctor, I think, I have successfully described in this poem! When I was under one of the spells of sleeplessness, I wrote this poem to kill time during those nights and to sublimate my frustration through writing something that pleased me.

To Amerope was written upon reading somewhere about the new law introduced in the USA to ban all signs that evoked Christianity and its values from public and government places. It's very disturbing indeed to see Christian values disappear from all spheres of life as it is lived in the world known as Christian - by the world which is considered non-Christian - but which prides itself for having gone secular. To Amerope is addressed exactly to this world. I have tried to point out that time will show to those who have eyes to see the writing on the wall that Christianity and its values are of the essence to the life lived in the Christian world. If they are to stop living by this light, it will be their undoing by their own hands. It will make them part of the world of which the form is passing away. That is what we are witnessing now!

The last of the three major poems contained in this slender volume is Dream Sequence. It is about what its title suggests. What I saw in my dream I translated into this poem. I have tried to capture the atmosphere that pervaded my dream.

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About the Author

Born on 4th May 1971 to protestant parents, Wilson and Caroline Hatia, in a small village of a tribal Gujarat, he was reared strictly according to the Christian religious tradition and the distinctly urban Gujarati social tradition.

His father was a professor of English literature and his mother a scholar of Gujarati literature. So literature is in his blood, so to say. But since his mother tongue was Gujarati and he didn't know English much, nor was he ready to learn it from his father because of his hard taskmastership, which shied him away from English literature, initially he was inclined more toward Gujarati literature. Nevertheless, it did cultivate his love for literature.

However, after finishing his secondary education with the subjects of science, he decided to change the stream and study English literature at bachelor level. Though this decision was taken purely from a career point of view, it not only marked a turning point in his career as a student, but also a starting point of his literary journey. Most of his poems contained in To Amerope and Other Poems were actually written at the time when he was studying for the bachelor's degree.

Studying English literature provided him with an opportunity for cultural exchange with Great Britain, and stimulated his mind with great ideas. The more he studied, the more his hunger grew. He began wishing intensely how good it were if he could express himself even half as well as the authors he studied. It was this desire that led him to write. To Amerope and Other Poems is the first fruit of his literary endeavors.

The way his first attempted novel entitled On Earth the Broken Arcs In Heaven a Perfect Round reads, and to hear him talk about it, it is clear that his passion for writing just begins to show the marks of both his growing maturity and confidence as a writer. One can only wish he gets a publisher for it. Doubtlessly, the Indian English literature will have yet another proud moment in its history the day this book gets published.

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Excerpts

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