The Parrot, the Horse and the Man

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by Amarjit Chandan

Bilingual English / Punjabi edition

Translated by the author with Julia Casterton, Vanessa Gebbie, Ajmer Rode, Jaspal Singh, Stephen Watts and John Welch

The Parrot, the Horse & the Man, Amarjit Chandan’s second full-length collection from Arc, is every bit as compelling and memorable as his first. Here is a poet who finds beauty in the ordinary, who is able to build images of the every day into universal concepts that inspire a sense of awe. There is also a silence in Chandan’s poetry, or, as the poet Arundhathi Subramanian puts it a deep sense of the unspoken… [where] words are precarious and makeshift signposts in a vast hinterland of memory.

Each of Chandan’s poems proceeds in its own way and has its own form. Yet in all of them there is an assembly of different space-time dimensions.

– John Berger