My name is Andrea Sirotti and am a teacher of English in Italy and a member of the editorial staff of Semicerchio, a journal of comparative poetry based in Florence (you can visit us at http://www.unisi.it/semicerchio ).
I am editing a new anthology of South Asian women poets writing in English due to be brought out in the first months of 2000 and I would like to include some of your poems, which I could read in your beautiful web site and which I very much appreciated.
So far I have selected (and translated) these poems of yours: A Civilised Dinner, Puzzle from Hell, Listening to my Daughter, Fishflowers in your Eyes, Spring and Child Seen through a Glass, Darkly, though I think that only three, four of them will be included in the selection because of the limited size of the anthology.
Would you agree in having them published?
So clearly I won't make a penny out of this and will probably be lucky if they can spare a copy or two for me, and I won't be able to read it because it'll be in Italian, but gosh, it's just so darn cool! And partly just because I don't usually think of myself as a 'poet'. I've neglected poetry so, in the last several years of studying fiction. I'm surprised it still speaks to me. But I've been feeling like poetry for days now; it just hasn't jelled into anything solid yet. So I suppose poetry hasn't abandoned me yet.
4:00. Heather e-mailed and asked that the above poems be linked, so I have, except for "Spring". I don't think I have a poem of that title -- perhaps she's thinking of Blue Spring Thinking or In Spring -- I'm not sure. It's an odd set of poems; Civilized Dinner is rather silly, Puzzle from Hell is one of the painful Kevin poems, Fishflowers is a silly sound-piece for the most part, and Listening and Child are both a fair bit more serious. I don't know that I would have selected most of them, but I'm not going to complain about her choice. :-)
While I'm here, I should note that I'll be in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving (at Sherman's folks' place, a tradition), so I may not be updating regularly between Tuesday and Saturday. I'll do my best, though. And now, back to the grading and nursing a sick Kevin (nursing him mostly consists of letting him watch tv at my place when he's getting stir-crazy at his place; he doesn't take cosseting well...)