I disagree with T.S. Eliot – this year, April was not the cruelest month after all. The floods receded from my walls, the days grew longer and their grey edge faded. My lost thoughts in bits of paper were found. And a video presentation by me evoked an expat’s musings from across lands and borders and other incarnations, real or imagined. It was inspired by the event sponsored, yes, in April, by the League of Canadian Poets, and the 2020 National Poetry Month, with the theme of “A World of Poetry”.

The video was presented virtually on Facebook’s ArtBarPoetryReadingSeries page on a Tuesday. The Art Bar is the longest-running, poetry only weekly series in Canada and has a special place in my history: in 1991, I was one of the founding members of the Art Bar in Toronto.

For this reading, I searched through my collection of poems from Sandalwood Thoughts and Occasionally and plucked and wove poems which conjure disparate voices of poetry from a diverse world, where memories are sketches of grief and laughter.

Founder of the Ontario Poetry Society, Bunny Iskov’s words encapsulate the essence of my poems:

Suparna Ghosh writes her poetry with a paint brush, creating wonderful works of art vibrant in colour and in form. Her lines will cling to you, and you will embrace them for a long time.

Writer, anthologist and recipient of the Order of Canada, John Robert Colombo, who was one of the founders of the League of Canadian Poets, stated:

Both her (Suparna’s) paintings and her poems are rich in extraordinarily bright and vivid colours and rhythms, so they illuminate and enrich the traditional landscape of Canadian art and literature.

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