This first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. 

In this anthology, poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.

Sri Lanka has thrilled the foreign imagination as a land of infinite possibility. Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers envisioned an island of gems and pearls, a stopping-point on the Silk Road; tourists today are sold a vision of golden beaches and swaying palm trees, delicious food and smiling locals. This favours the south of the island over the north rebuilt piecemeal after the end of the civil war in 2009, and erases a history of war crimes, illicit assassination of activists and journalists, subjugation of minorities, and a legacy of governmental corruption that has now led the country into economic and social crisis. Through its broad range of poets, Out of Sri Lanka redresses this imbalance. 

The stimulus for these poems is a collection of photographs taken of the poet’s father, originally from colonial Sri Lanka, who was serving as a radio operator in an otherwise all white platoon in the 1939-45 desert war in North Africa. As for so many who came back from war to start or resume a family life, there was a great gulf of silence, an unwillingness to speak of those experiences. The collection begins and ends in an imaginative recreation of the life suggested in those photographs, many reproduced in this collection. There is connection with a much-loved father, but also a sense of the unknowable. Speaking in the voice of the father and of the unknown photographer, poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed “Snowball” in his lens. From this imaginative core, poems move out to make connections with the remembered and known life of a father who died too soon, to self-reflections on the poet as remembrancer, creator and actor in the world. There are moving poems on the meaning of inherited objects – a paper-knife, letters – and inherited ways of being – the birdwatching that provides a rich source of imagery. The personal moves out to the resonances of what was, in its origins, a story of migration. Here the father’s success in finding of a home in Yorkshire is seen to contrast sharply with the tragedies of migrant deaths in the face of fortress Europe. This is a work of great beauty, whose lucid simplicity of language is married to a rich complexity of structure and the bird-flight of images that connect poem to poem. There is humour, too, in the revenant voice of the mother who inserts herself into the poet’s memory and demands in her “broad Yorkshire vowels […] ‘Why is your dad getting all the attention?’”

In her fourth collection, Seni Seneviratne extends her reputation as a fine poet whose incisive social and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of her collections, where individual poems are enriched by their place in the whole and their dialogue with each other. In this collection, the connecting thread is the bird, both in its observed physical otherness and as an image that carries cultural and historical resonances.

Colonial Countryside is a book of commissioned poems and short stories produced by ten global majority writers featuring National Trust houses with significant colonial histories. This includes properties whose owners engaged in the slavery business, in colonial administration or who were involved with the East India Company or British rule in India.

Historians have accompanied these pieces with commentaries detailing the evidence upon which each creative commission was based. The book ends with a photo essay by the project’s commissioned photographer, Ingrid Pollard, the Turner Prize shortlisted artist who has pioneered critical interventions into the supposed whiteness of the British countryside.

This first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. 

In this anthology, poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.

Sri Lanka has thrilled the foreign imagination as a land of infinite possibility. Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers envisioned an island of gems and pearls, a stopping-point on the Silk Road; tourists today are sold a vision of golden beaches and swaying palm trees, delicious food and smiling locals. This favours the south of the island over the north rebuilt piecemeal after the end of the civil war in 2009, and erases a history of war crimes, illicit assassination of activists and journalists, subjugation of minorities, and a legacy of governmental corruption that has now led the country into economic and social crisis. Through its broad range of poets, Out of Sri Lanka redresses this imbalance. 

The stimulus for these poems is a collection of photographs taken of the poet’s father, originally from colonial Sri Lanka, who was serving as a radio operator in an otherwise all white platoon in the 1939-45 desert war in North Africa. As for so many who came back from war to start or resume a family life, there was a great gulf of silence, an unwillingness to speak of those experiences. The collection begins and ends in an imaginative recreation of the life suggested in those photographs, many reproduced in this collection. There is connection with a much-loved father, but also a sense of the unknowable. Speaking in the voice of the father and of the unknown photographer, poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed “Snowball” in his lens. From this imaginative core, poems move out to make connections with the remembered and known life of a father who died too soon, to self-reflections on the poet as remembrancer, creator and actor in the world. There are moving poems on the meaning of inherited objects – a paper-knife, letters – and inherited ways of being – the birdwatching that provides a rich source of imagery. The personal moves out to the resonances of what was, in its origins, a story of migration. Here the father’s success in finding of a home in Yorkshire is seen to contrast sharply with the tragedies of migrant deaths in the face of fortress Europe. This is a work of great beauty, whose lucid simplicity of language is married to a rich complexity of structure and the bird-flight of images that connect poem to poem. There is humour, too, in the revenant voice of the mother who inserts herself into the poet’s memory and demands in her “broad Yorkshire vowels […] ‘Why is your dad getting all the attention?’”

In her fourth collection, Seni Seneviratne extends her reputation as a fine poet whose incisive social and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of her collections, where individual poems are enriched by their place in the whole and their dialogue with each other. In this collection, the connecting thread is the bird, both in its observed physical otherness and as an image that carries cultural and historical resonances.

Colonial Countryside is a book of commissioned poems and short stories produced by ten global majority writers featuring National Trust houses with significant colonial histories. This includes properties whose owners engaged in the slavery business, in colonial administration or who were involved with the East India Company or British rule in India.

Historians have accompanied these pieces with commentaries detailing the evidence upon which each creative commission was based. The book ends with a photo essay by the project’s commissioned photographer, Ingrid Pollard, the Turner Prize shortlisted artist who has pioneered critical interventions into the supposed whiteness of the British countryside.