Musings on moments and emotions of daily life
Being one of the Spittels, it was no surprise that Premini Amerasinghe would wield the pen adroitly even while being a busy radiologist. Her uncle, Richard Lionel Spittel, was the famous ‘surgeon in the wilderness’ and champion of the Veddahs - an anthropologist and poet-at-heart, whilst his sister Beatrice, Premini’s mother, read the Iliad to Premini when she was eight.
Premini’s latest book Brush Strokes is a new offering of her poetry that captures with tactile language a moment, a mood, a scene; each luscious and onomatopoeic, polished and urbane with shrewd observations. Her literary oeuvre is impressive: she has won the State Literary Award on two occasions for Footprints (2021) and Tapestry of Verse (2019), and of her books, Kaleidoscope (poems) was shortlisted for Gratiaen Prize (2002), Tangled Threads in 2009 and The Search was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award (2003).
From a young age Premini was surrounded by ‘age-related’ literature. There was Winnie the Pooh and she would go on to Kipling while poetry was in the fringes; Shelley with his romantic verse and Dylan Thomas - also pastoral with those Welsh landscapes.
Written over the past three years, the 40 plus poems in Brush Strokes include musings mostly born while looking out from the balcony of her Nawala home on to an open canal which has crocodiles as well as pelicans, egrets, cormorants and the occasional painted stork.
By her teen years, Premini’s tastes in poetry were ‘established’, but it was in the late 70s during her professional life in Kandy that she seriously tried her hand at writing when Prof. Valentine Basnayake, famous professor of physiology and pianist, requested her to write an alternative to Ogden Nash's verses for The Carnival of the Animals (Le Carnaval des animaux by Camille Saint-Saëns), the musical suite, for a regular gathering.
And then the riots of 1971, 1983 and 19871989 made her go for pen and paper- ‘because
poetry is always inspired by upheavals’.
They were also coloured by the fact that in her own youth there was ‘absolutely no enmity at all between the races’. At CMS Ladies’ College most of her best friends were Tamil and having schooled at Badulla, Ratnapura, etc. moving as wont in her father Dr. Hilary Goonewardene's profession (he being a cardiologist), she was friendly with people from all communities and this has continued throughout her life, as she settled in Kandy with her husband, the orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Mark
Amerasinghe (also very much inclined towards the arts) and their four daughters.
The present collection was triggered by the death of a beloved pet. It was the absence of this sleek grey feline in the home that was the trigger for all but two poems in this collection, all written after 2021.
Premini is one of those blissful writers who never writes out of a dutiful feeling every day. She courts the muse as and when it claims her. Everyday evanescent moments as well as major tragedies are grist to her mill.
There is this on the daily din of living in their previous residence in Colombo:
“With morning comes the clatter of cups/ Sleepy murmurs whilst waking up/ The persistent mewing of our cat…/ …school drums beat/ Choral singing is faintly heard…/ the decibel level rises higher and higher/ At dusk, the temple vies with the mosque”
Counter to this is ‘Israel’ which has the breath of epic tragedy nay Armageddon:
“A nomadic tribe of wanderers/ Until, at Joshua’s bidding/ The city walls came tumbling down…”
A land finally.
“Rechristened Israel… distorted thinking/ cemented the concept of a “chosen race”/ tenacious tentacles trespassed/ On Palestinian lands…/ The utterings of their most famous son/ “Love thy neighbour as thyself ”/ Shattered by gunfire”.
In between, there are poems like A Visiting Poet, where she paints a picture of a fellow poet here from Grenada:
“His voice drips likes treacle/ Or more aptly, / The sap of sugar-cane/ Thickening and bubbling in large vats/ Its sturdy fronds entrapped/
Generations of his family.”
They both have memories of savouring sapodillas in their respective childhood gardens:
“And for us both, from disparate isles/ That sensuous experience/ transforms into the poetic phrase”
Despite its somewhat melancholic inspiration, the collection reminds us that the poet had the privilege to live in what were idyllic times; a happy childhood and a life well lived. There is no obsession here of ‘the depressing and the obscure’ as Premini describes poets like Sylvia Plath and other moderns.
Her own work is pensive, gentle and above all, a celebration of life. Her aversion to Picasso thus is typical:
“An art form which distorts nature/ Shocks us with blue cows weighed down by gigantic udders/ Shudders are soon replaced by sycophancy! Or, is this a monstrous prank perpetrated on us?”
At a sprightly 90, her poems that contemplate the autumn of one's life dot the collection in oranges and rust red. In Mortis:
“Large leaves transform/ To charcoal blobs/ Upon a flaming sky/ Silence smothers/ The babbler’s eager twitter… The last rites for a dying day, / If only life would leak away/ So painlessly…”
As we leave Premini’s memory-laden room hung with paintings by J.L.K. Van Dort's son and a recent portrait of herself in a saree by a friend and other mementoes after chatting about many things, we realize we had been captive over an hour to a bygone era, to which Premini offered us a privileged peek.