“Introduction / Pengantar: Crossing Bloodlines” by Deborah Cole, Cordite Poetry Review: Indonesia Special Issue

“The poems in this collection trace the overlapping cycles of the human journey from birth to death across the space/time habitat we measure in footfalls and poetic metre. Travelled in the company of family and community, our journeys enact the species’ heritage and legacy of kinship and violence – two sides of the same struggle towards a longed-for intimacy that might negate the spatial, temporal and psychological divide between the other and the self. Through commingling languages and intertwining elocutions, this issue explores the distances and intimacies between a varied set of human journeys by poets writing in Indonesia and Australia. As these two countries are so close on maps – but oftentimes, sadly, only on our maps – these poems invite the re-arrangement of our conceptual geographies.

 

This collection began as a conversation between Kent MacCarter and Sapardi Djoko Damono (arguably Indonesia’s best-known contemporary poet and leading literary scholar). The goal was to create a translation exchange that would showcase established poets whose work was still very much on the rise with a balanced representation of gender, ethnicity and region in each country. A second conversation between MacCarter and John McGlynn (leading translator of Indonesian literature into English and editor-in-chief of The Lontar Foundation) led to an invitation to McGlynn, poet Dorothea Rosa Herliany and me (Deborah Cole) to join the project – an invitation that we accepted enthusiastically.”

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An extract from another essay in this volume was featured earlier on this site: “Notes about the INDONESIA Special Issue | Kent MacCarter ”