{"title":"Books by Seni Seneviratne","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781845235567","title":"The Go-Away Bird","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn her fourth collection, \u003cstrong\u003eSeni Seneviratne\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205549654194,"sku":"9781845235567","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845235567.jpg?v=1786029008"},{"product_id":"9781845235666","title":"Colonial Countryside: Creative and Historical Responses","description":"\u003cp\u003eColonial 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHistorians 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43206276546738,"sku":"9781845235666","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845235666_c51444a1-b8bb-4ac7-b871-8de596c48207.jpg?v=1786029016"},{"product_id":"9781845234515","title":"Unknown Soldier","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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. \u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e 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?’”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307825082741,"sku":"9781845234515","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845234515_d6d2a839-170f-40a1-b242-106213d48e83.jpg?v=1786028988"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-seni-seneviratne.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}