The third preview on YouTube of Boatman! take these songs from me,
a bilingual tanka sequence, comes with an appreciation from poet-critic Waqas Khwaja.
Text: Gabriel Rosenstock. Artwork and Film: Masood Hussain
It only gets better and better! A poet at the height of his powers, and an artist in complete command of his medium, his imagination on fire—what happens when they come together in electrifying collaboration? Of stray pieces and objects is great art made, and poetry, but the unreflecting ordinary eye would not know it until the metamorphic creative imagination reorders the vision, rearranges words, images, and objects for us. Masood Hussain’s movingly wrought reliefs, in heart-rending earth colors of impassioned blues, metallic greens, ochres, rust, and stanched crimson, and Gabriel Rosenstock’s chiseled latticework of sublime tanka, melodic and polyphonic at the same time in conversation with each other, are steeped in sorrow, yet improbably uplifting in an aesthetic experience crafted and shaped out of life’s wilderness of travails and tragedies gratuitously inflicted on a people caught in an ancient struggle for self-liberation and self-realization. The Irish and the Kashmiri, inextricably bonded and blended in their toils, their pains, their struggles and longings, in their creative gusto, transport the reader to the domain of the mystical sublime. Boatman! take these songs from me captures the imagination as only great art can, to leave an enthralling, lasting impact.