Sonja Besford, arrivals & departures. London: ASWA, 2001. ISBN: 0-9541777-0-3 [Book review]

Sonja Besford’s collection of poems arrivals & departures, her first in English, takes the reader full circle, from the birth of an individual to the sacrificial death of a nation. It glares with passion and convoluting sin on a journey rich in sound, taste, colour and perfume. The world of imagination thus disclosed reveals an insatiable dreamer and a romantic akin, in the British tradition, only to Byron. As a post-modernist, Besford can be genderless too. Her instincts, those that find a way into her poetry, are ubiquitously human. But when frustrated, they turn into an outburst of adjectives, all of them signifiers of the mystifying depth of the human heart. The enfolding imagery galvanizes all senses and compels the mind to reconcile the rational and irrational, fact and dreams, in a poetic elucidation of the world and its kaleidoscopic manifestations that drive all life along the trajectory of light and darkness.