For a contextualized glossary of Lashkari terms that have migrated into the English language, see the novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s scintillating The Ibis Chrestomathy (http://www.amitavghosh.com/chrestomathy.html). For ongoing discussions related to this subject, see, also, his blog: http://amitavghosh.com/blog/ (accessed 23 March 2017).

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‘Sycorax’

Sycorax is Caliban’s mother in Shakespeare’s memorable late work, The Tempest. Described as a ‘witch’, she is said to have died before the events of the play; however, the consequences of her actions inform the narrative. In this poem, I take the liberty of assigning to Sycorax the fate to which she consigned the spirit Ariel: that of being trapped in a tree for eternity. In casting Prospero as the occupier of the island and Sycorax as its original inhabitant, I act on a contemporary critical reading of ‘The Tempest’ as an allegory of colonial expansion. See Ania Loomba’s magisterial Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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‘A Constantly Unfinished Instrument’

In an interview with Paul Morley for the Guardian (17 January 2010), the pioneering musician and cultural thinker Brian Eno observed: ‘One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage. A piano comes with a whole history of music. There are all sorts of cultural conventions built into traditional instruments that tell you where and when that instrument comes from. When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically. You’re designing a new instrument. That’s what a synthesiser is essentially. It’s a constantly unfinished instrument. You finish it when you tweak it, and play around with it, and decide how to use it. You can combine a number of cultural references into one new thing.’ See: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/17/brian-eno-interview-paul-morley (accessed 23 March 2017).

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‘Night Sky and Counting’

This poem was written in response to the writer, photographer and art historian Teju Cole’s account of his experience of the artist Laura Poitras’s work, ‘Astro Noise’ (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016), in the course of a conversation at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2 May 2016.

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‘Pompeii Mural’

The passages in italics are adapted from Ovid’s Tristia, Book I.XI. See Ovid, Tristia & Ex Ponto (trans. A L Wheeler; rev. G.P. Goold/Loeb Classical Library No: 151; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924).

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‘Wound’