Migrant States

"In 'Recalling Sundays, ' Indran begins, 'I have fought the blues on so many Sundays...'. It locates him immediately: his ear for the language, the jazz of these 'migrant states', and his emotional condition, as one of so many in exile. In powerful poems that testify to the will to live, he intersperses verses he wrote to celebrate Walt Whitman, the keeper of the American Ideal. Indran is of like mind, believing that in the monastery of poetry, in the fields of the imagination, 'the dragon of reality might follow, to be slain'. In "Beating," he writes, ' . . . when this poem goes off the road/spins wheels in the mud. . . . ' It is with such gifted lines, such joy in the performance of duty, that this poet allows the metaphor its chance to create a Heaven, that reminds the migrant states of the promise they once held, that poetry still holds in its ability to combat the blues." --Mervyn Taylor