Jeet Thayil’s poetry is quintessentially urban and cosmopolitan, not least in its street-wise language and fast pace. In ‘The Heroin Sestina’ the repeated end-words of the sestina form are deftly used to express the ambivalence of the now “stone-sober” drug addict towards his former “stoned life . . . chased, snorted, shot life”. It was all time “wasted”, “killed”, “squashed flat” – but that crushing of time by “the stone” is also what he or she craves: “You want it now, the way it lays you low, / flattens everything you know / to a thin white line.” An extraordinary poem, which somehow takes you not just into the mind but also the body of the addict.

‘Body’ is the title of a poem by Robin Ngangom, a lyric poet who writes in English and Manipuri. It’s not time that’s the enemy of the body, the poet says, but “the mind with its dark pledges”. Yet the body resists and is essentially resilient: “Remove a hand and the foot starts painting, / Deny eyes and fingers are already on the keys.” This and other poems such as ‘Native Land’ and ‘Flight’ also reveal clearly what India editor Arundhathi Subramaniam calls Ngangom’s “deeply internalised politics”.

Finally in the India pages are five poems by the eminent Gujarati poet and playwright, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, drawn from collections spanning four decades. ‘Forest’ (from a 2008 volume), in which the burning of the rainforest can be read both literally and metaphorically – with multiple meanings – is a powerful poem for our times.

The three Colombian poets, Fernando Denis, Fernando Linero and Mauricio Contreras, all in their different ways explore the theme of artistic creation. Fernando Denis, a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite “in love with dreams”, responds in a highly imagistic, sensual way to a range of works of art – from the paintings of William Turner to Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “architecture of hell” to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The other two poets reflect more specifically on poetry and writing poems. In ‘The Baker and I’ Fernando Linero says that what the poet does is as “important”, “nutritious” and “real” as what the baker does. ‘Notes for my Autobiography’ contains a fuller poetic credo:

I believe in a dialogue with light,
in a dialogue with the Earth,
to exalt the senses.
I began to write poetry at the age of 15.
I think it cures us of a certain disillusion,
of a certain melancholy,
and it allows us, although fleetingly,
to recover things lost:
it helps us to understand a little
the sense of what is properly human.

The short prose poems of Mauricio Contreras are, in part, meditations on poetry, each taking the metaphor of a single scene or event, remembered or imagined. One of these, ‘An ancient legend relates events of a tribe of dreamers’, describes violent, atavistic rituals which nevertheless end with “the voice of the women under the stars. Poetry arranging chaos”.

The first Morocco issue to appear on PIW since January 2005 also features a prose poet, Hassan El Ouazzani. Editor Norddine Zouitni writes: “What makes El Ouazzani’s poetry so enjoyable is to a great extent its aura of intimacy and the simplicity of its language, which the poet achieves without sacrificing depth and meaning.” El Ouazzani is also a veteran of the poetry festival scene and has performed in many countries around the world. Click on the YouTube link on the poet page for a taste of his passionate, declamatory performance style.

Ireland completes this month’s issue with work by two very different poets. Dennis O'Driscoll’s recurrent themes are time, aging, mortality, death (especially sudden death) and loss; several of the poems here are list poems, which achieve universality both through their close observation of the commonplace, of everyday, routine actions – which we don’t know at the time to be our last, or someone else’s last – and through their inclusiveness (the widely anthologised ‘Someone’, for example, shifts back and forth between genders). Mercifully, there’s humour, too, alongside the pain and poignancy.

Mary O'Malley  is concerned less with everyday repetition and routine as with the potency of particular, ‘Proustian’ moments. And with her we also come full circle, back to the body, to the physicality of a memory suddenly unlocked – whether of a lover’s hand on your hip, the stirring of desire, or the way it feels to hold a child:

By daily teaching the body new habits,
planets are persuaded out of orbit.

In seconds it is all undone. Holding Rosa
in a Dublin hotel is going to sleep
in a house on the shore and waking up
to the same sound. The magnetic dock
of child to hip, earth to moon, time stolen. (‘Holding Rosa’)

It’s been a privilege to work on this issue of PIW. I hope readers enjoy its riches as much as I have done.