This collaboration, this collection, named after the goddess of poetry and music, the one who is responsible for expanding wisdom’s illumination. What Kemp and Hryniuk do in this book is gather up pieces of journal entries, scraps of poetry, reminiscences, travelogue, and fragments of poems translated into Punjabi. If you don’t read or understand Punjabi, you need to also get a hold of the sound opera of Sarasvati Scapes. To read the book, to skim the poems, is nothing if you cannot immerse yourself in the sounds, in the rhythms and magic of the sound opera CD that accompanies the printed volume.
The sound opera CD for Sarasvati Scapes is what ‘makes’ this collection transcendent and transformative. My first listening to the CD took place on a sunny, quiet Monday morning, on a back porch in Northern Ontario. The sounds of the Punjabi language, the sounds of the poets reading their narratives and poems, transported me from the back porch to the sensory imagery so present in India. The pilgrimage to India, by both poets, is something that teaches us we need to journey inside ourselves (even) before we travel physically anywhere beyond Canadian borders. “The breath is our teacher./It is always with us./Everywhere/anytime. // Concentrate on breath/because mind/like any other sense/organ can focus/on only one thing/ at a time.” These lines remind us that we should be willing to let go of the ego, to escape the trap of the conscious mind, to meditate and reach beyond ourselves to a universal that we cannot always understand.
An excellent pairing, book and sound opera CD, for anyone interested in yoga, eastern philosophies and beliefs, or just for anyone who wants to travel while seated on their back porch, reveling in the beauty of the sounds that surround and live in your heart.
Kim Fahner teaches English at Marymount Academy in Sudbury. She is a poet, having published You Must Imagine The Cold Here (Your Scrivener Press, 1997) and braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001). In the late 1990s, she was shortlisted for the Air Canada/CAA Award for Most Promising Canadian Writer Under 30. As well, she has had a number of poems and short stories published in various Canadian journals over the years, with her most recent publication being a story in Bluffs: Northeastern Ontario Stories from the Edge (Your Scrivener Press, 2006). She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and had the great pleasure of studying with Mr. Timothy Findley as her mentor, via the Humber School for Writers, in the late 1990s. Also in the 1990s, she published a poetry journal called like lemmings: poetry over the edge with fellow Sudbury writer, Melanie Marttila.