Overview

In August 1981, on his way from one job in Kuwait to another in Tokyo, Paul Rossiter travelled for a month in Sri Lanka. Coconut Palms and Sandalwood Boxes is a book-length episodic poem that traces a journey from the old Dutch fortified town of Galle in the south-west of the island, through the centre - Colombo, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya, with their echoes of the British colonial era - and on to the north-east and the ruined cities of the ancient Sinhalese Buddhist kingdom. The writing is full of places, people, temples, and landscapes, and in the first part of the journey the impressions of the British twentieth-century budget traveller are amplified by or contrasted with reports by some nineteenth-century imperial travellers, notably the ever-ebullient Charles Henry Sirr, author of Ceylon and the Cingalese (1850), and the rather more hard-nosed Lieutenant Augustus De Butts of the Madras Army, author of Rambles in Ceylon (1841). As the journey to the north continues, however, these ghostly voices of a vanished imperialism gradually fade away to be replaced by a barer, more stripped-down attention to place. Even if the apparently peaceful atmosphere of the island meant that underlying tensions were not obvious to the visitor, 1981 was in fact a crucial year in Sri Lankan history and politics, one in which the country perhaps definitively tipped towards the civil war that would engulf the island from 1983 to 2009. The book ends with a short account of happenings in the city of Jaffna in the extreme north-east of the island, the centre of Sri Lanka's Tamil community, on the nights of 31 May and 1 June 1981 - events (not personally witnessed and only later learnt about) that foreshadowed the horrors to come.

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Paul Rossiter has lived in London, Kuwait and Japan. After retiring from teaching at the University of Tokyo in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan and translations of modern and contemporary Japanese poetry. Coconut Palms and Sandalwood Boxes is his tenth book of poems.

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