{"title":"Seni Seneviratne","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the poignant poetry and prose of Seni Seneviratne, a British Sri Lankan voice exploring identity, memory, and belonging. Perfect for readers seeking lyrical reflections on culture and heritage.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"unknown-soldier-book-seni-seneviratne-9781845234515","title":"Unknown Soldier","description":"The 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.   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.   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?’”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49734292668689,"sku":"NGR9781845234515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50653376577809,"sku":"GOR010157599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50950145343761,"sku":"GOR010839002","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1845234510.jpg?v=1750724720"},{"product_id":"wild-cinnamon-and-winter-skin-book-seni-seneviratne-9781845230500","title":"Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin","description":"Offering a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love, and loss, this collection of poems reflects the author s personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries, traveling from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century. Elsewhere, time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century and another poem, based on childhood memories, places her in 1950 s Yorkshire but echoes links with her Sri Lankan heritage.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737501016337,"sku":"NGR9781845230500","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50142390190353,"sku":"GOR001989554","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53238985425169,"sku":"GOR003152029","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1845230507.jpg?v=1751154413"},{"product_id":"go-away-bird-book-seni-seneviratne-9781845235567","title":"The Go-Away Bird","description":"In her fourth collection, Seni Seneviratne extends her reputation as a fine poet whose incisive social, ecological and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of the whole, where individual poems dialogue with each other across five sections. 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. As a poet who balances careful observation with imaginative flight, Seni Seneviratne addresses both heart and mind.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753051562257,"sku":"NGR9781845235567","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51402887463185,"sku":"GOR013466334","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1845235568.jpg?v=1751154415"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-seni-seneviratne.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}