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When Renée Saklikar was aged 23, her aunt and uncle were murdered aboard Air India Flight 182. Among the many viewpoints encased in her debut collection, children of air India (Nightwood 2013), she examines why most Canadians still feel more strongly about the 9/11 terrorism attacks that killed New Yorkers rather than the Air India disaster, on June 23, 1985, that killed 329 people, mostly Canadians, making it Canada's worst mass murder. Saklikar's elegiac sequences explore private loss and public trauma, blending fiction and poetry, after a 20-year investigation culminated in a high-profile trial that ended with the accused being acquitted, adding to the pain. The title of her debut collection is uncapitalized and presented as children of air india: un/authorized exhibita and interjections. It won the Canadian Authors Award for best book of Canadian poetry to be published in English and was a finalist for the B.C. Book prize Dorothy Livesay award.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar was named the first Poet Laureate of Surrey in 2015 and also became involved in the administrative hierarchy of the Writers Union, having also co-written an opera on the Air India tragedy as a Canada-Ireland collaboration. In the same year, she co-edited a new anthology with Wayde Compton, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press) that includes poetry performed during Lunch Poems at SFU, a poetry reading series that she helped to establish. In late October she was featured on the cover of WE, the West Ender , for the opera project, Air India [Redacted], November 6-11, 2015, at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar was born in India but moved to Canada at a young age. A graduate of SFU Writers Studio, she is the wife of former provincial NDP leader Adrian Dix and the daughter of Rev. Vasant Saklikar, deceased, a former B.C. School Trustee and United Church Minister. Portions of her life-long poem chronicle called thecanadaproject have been published in various publications such as Ryga: A Journal of Provocations, Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Review, and Prism International.
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Listening to the Bees by Mark L. Winston & Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(Nightwood Editions $22.95)
Review by Mary Ann Moore
Mark l. Winston, one of the world's leading experts on bees and pollination, writes in one of his essays: "Science with its reliance on data and objectivity, may seem the least poetic of professions, but scientists and poets have at least one thing in common: we share a love of words and exploration."
Winston's extensive research includes graduate studies at the University of Kansas where he analyzed the mouthparts ("labiomaxillary complex") of long-tongued bees.
Now Winston and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, have created a "call-and-response rhythm," mixing Winston's essays with Saklikar's poems, for Listening to the Bees. And, yes, they have included a poem entitled "Labiomaxillary."
In french guiana on the north-east coast of South America, Winston observed stingless bees. In recent years, he has become an informal advisor to Hives for Humanity (H4H) in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
For twenty years, beginning in 1980, an abandoned building at the edge of SFU downtown became the Bee House where Winston and his researcher students were the Swarm Team.
He continues to learn how bees provide a model for how to be in the world: "collaborative and communicative, listening deeply to others, being present in the moment."
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a mentor and instructor for SFU's writing and publishing program who spent time with Winston's original research documents. She writes:
"My poetics lean to language as material, and the quest is to marry song, chants, spells and incantations with syntactical wordplay, embroidering the poems I make with numeric patterns, such as my obsession with both hexagons and anything to do with the number six, and the ten-syllable line, whose movement sometimes leads to form poetic structures..." In each form, she allows "lyricism to exist within and alongside the language of science" with less description and more sound.
"Scientific language," says Winston, "becomes poetry for me through the sheer joy of jargon's sound and rhythm." For instance, one of the terms that "evokes personal resonance" is "hibernalcum, a place of abode in which a creature seeks refuge."
There are photos and illustrations throughout the book as well as an appendix of terms related to Winston's published research papers. Alongside Saklikar's poem "Hibernacula" is a photograph of the poet sitting on the back of a garden bench surrounded by blooms and structures in the form of large-winged bees.
Saklikar titles a poem "a moishe (To Mark)" which ends: "into the bee yard / you brought me-and so we whispered / let the song reside in us forever." Mark L. Winston says of collaborating with Saklikar, "her poetry has deepened my own thinking about the science I've done over the last forty-five years." 978-0-88971-346-8
Mary Ann Moore is a poet, and writing mentor in Nanaimo. Her last book was Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press) She blogs at apoetsnanaimo.ca
Bramah and the Beggar Boy by Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(Nightwood $26.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan
In a new fantasy novel set in the not too far-off future, a band of anti-authoritarian resisters is determined to preserve themselves and a degraded humanity against fearful odds. At stake is nothing less than planetary ecological survival.
The cast contains chiefly female lead characters and the story involves time travel via portals in the Perimeter, a huge post-ecocide territory governed by a brutal force called Consortium. Within the scores of mostly single-page verse accounts—some are longer—we encounter themes involving self and community identity, shifting tides of good and evil and what East-West philosopher Alan Watts (1915–1973) called “overcoming suffering.”
Action takes place largely in “Pacifica,” a coastal region resembling Cascadia. Language has deteriorated, but familiar names arise—Barnston Island, the Albion Ferry, Cedar Cottage, the Rentalsman and more.
Story-time begins at the Winter Portal. The earth is akilter and “spores, viruses [are] spreading.” Masks are important. Droughts, wild fires and melting ice-caps accelerate eco-change.
The parallels with current climate change disasters and our past pandemic year and a half are obvious. But in Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Bramah and the Beggar Boy, which has been ten years in the making, there’s even more societal devolution.
Something is amiss in this dystopian world—milk won’t curdle, bread won’t rise and an ominous Investigator lurks on behalf of the Consortium, tracking down dissenters to its authority. When the voices of ragamuffin beggar boys call for aid—“Turn your key, Bramah, and find us at last,” Bramah the heroine arrives packing “tools plus lasers, all the latest gadgets.”
With her tattooed arm she’s a “turner of bad odds.” Bramah, we’re told, is part-human, part-goddess, brown and beautiful, and a female locksmith. Like a character from Indic legends she comes from the “far future.” An employee of the Consortium, she can travel in time and is tasked with retrieving a valuable box. But hearing the pleas of young resisters, Bramah goes rogue.
A first critical turn occurs when Bramah and her Beggar Boy sidekick find the box and snitch the contents. Escaping through a time portal, the crafty pair regroup in a Paris cafe. The box contains documents, disks, codes, maps and a parchment scroll of stories that will unfold for future survivors in recalibrating directions for a world gone off-course.
Female elders play critical roles. When the Beggar Boy is brought to Bramah’s grandmother we see the elders’ importance as “seed savers” in a ruined ecology. On their way to visit the elder, Bramah and the boy pass across time, vast earthscapes, diverse languages and cultures.
Among the many story lines in this novel is a group of Aunties associated with “The Wishing Well” who work clandestinely in preserving archival social memory and compiling seed-stocks for climate rehabilitation. There’s loving homage paid to bee-keeping, the joy of pollination, to royal queens and honey’s nutritional goodness—reminiscent of Listening to the Bees, Saklikar’s award-winning 2018 poetry and essay collection co-written with biologist Dr. Mark Winston. Indeed, the poet ranges widely in her idea-sources: a botanical remark references a “Great Companion” echoing Robin Blaser’s phrase for poetic mentors like Dante, Pindar and Robert Duncan in his serial epic The Holy Forest. Saklikar also acknowledges her own imposing lineage of inspiring mentors—Homer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Mahabharata, The Arabian Nights and fantasy fiction masters J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, among others.
An adopted beggar-girl, Abigail shapes Part Two. She’ll learn her mother’s story from one of the Aunties and the loveliest poetry in the book comes as a hologram message to the future from her mother—reminding her little survivor girl, “I will be/so silent/I will be that space hidden/... I will be the quiet of a forest/outside the gates/...where a bird sings/liquid/two notes/dropped into morning/ice in the face of a sun/... I will be/so silent/settled along the riverbank/city with its back/to the ocean/at night/a storefront/... I will be/that silent/unending night...”
Like Bramah, Abigail becomes a “purveyor of the artful dodge,” and in borrowing from South Asian religious mythologies, Saklikar’s interconnected heroines become mutually reflective. On meeting her soul-mate Bartholomew, love enters the saga; then after a sparkling exchange of letters we’re off toward second book-land in the poet’s promised trilogy.
Saklikar writes with keen metrical discipline, depicting finely polished images in lean lines that mix manifold verse forms. Expect ballad refrains, tricky codes, romantic letters and terse corporate reports. However, the slurries of poetic fragments she constructs, while skilfully effused, are often as ambiguous as Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds. Perhaps the poet intuits this. An end-note clarifies how her “obsession with formal poetry... finds its creative tension in the investigation of the fragment fused into forms of poetry...”
By nature, fragments are discontinuous; inevitably there’s a challenge in having these clearly understood. The author does provide extensive supplementary information, including a link and a code to an external website providing further back-up to the epic. It makes for busy reading. Some could be reset up front or in-text. Nevertheless, a 300-page verse epic is a formidable achievement.
The author notes that Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first in a planned 1,000-page saga. Fans of fantasy literature and long-form poetry with a gritty ecological resonance have plenty to look forward to. 9780889714021
BCBW 2021-22
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
***
BOOKS:
children of air india: un/authorized exhibita and interjections.(Nightwood, 2013) $18.95 978-0-88971-287-4
The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press), co-edited with Wayde Compton. $18 978-1-77214-032-3
Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018), co-authored with Mark L. Winston. $22.95 9780889713468
Bramah and the Beggar Boy (Nightwood, 2021) $26.95 9780889714021
[BCBW 2022] "Air India"
Renée Sarojini Saklikar was named the first Poet Laureate of Surrey in 2015 and also became involved in the administrative hierarchy of the Writers Union, having also co-written an opera on the Air India tragedy as a Canada-Ireland collaboration. In the same year, she co-edited a new anthology with Wayde Compton, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press) that includes poetry performed during Lunch Poems at SFU, a poetry reading series that she helped to establish. In late October she was featured on the cover of WE, the West Ender , for the opera project, Air India [Redacted], November 6-11, 2015, at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar was born in India but moved to Canada at a young age. A graduate of SFU Writers Studio, she is the wife of former provincial NDP leader Adrian Dix and the daughter of Rev. Vasant Saklikar, deceased, a former B.C. School Trustee and United Church Minister. Portions of her life-long poem chronicle called thecanadaproject have been published in various publications such as Ryga: A Journal of Provocations, Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Review, and Prism International.
***
Listening to the Bees by Mark L. Winston & Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(Nightwood Editions $22.95)
Review by Mary Ann Moore
Mark l. Winston, one of the world's leading experts on bees and pollination, writes in one of his essays: "Science with its reliance on data and objectivity, may seem the least poetic of professions, but scientists and poets have at least one thing in common: we share a love of words and exploration."
Winston's extensive research includes graduate studies at the University of Kansas where he analyzed the mouthparts ("labiomaxillary complex") of long-tongued bees.
Now Winston and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, have created a "call-and-response rhythm," mixing Winston's essays with Saklikar's poems, for Listening to the Bees. And, yes, they have included a poem entitled "Labiomaxillary."
In french guiana on the north-east coast of South America, Winston observed stingless bees. In recent years, he has become an informal advisor to Hives for Humanity (H4H) in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
For twenty years, beginning in 1980, an abandoned building at the edge of SFU downtown became the Bee House where Winston and his researcher students were the Swarm Team.
He continues to learn how bees provide a model for how to be in the world: "collaborative and communicative, listening deeply to others, being present in the moment."
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a mentor and instructor for SFU's writing and publishing program who spent time with Winston's original research documents. She writes:
"My poetics lean to language as material, and the quest is to marry song, chants, spells and incantations with syntactical wordplay, embroidering the poems I make with numeric patterns, such as my obsession with both hexagons and anything to do with the number six, and the ten-syllable line, whose movement sometimes leads to form poetic structures..." In each form, she allows "lyricism to exist within and alongside the language of science" with less description and more sound.
"Scientific language," says Winston, "becomes poetry for me through the sheer joy of jargon's sound and rhythm." For instance, one of the terms that "evokes personal resonance" is "hibernalcum, a place of abode in which a creature seeks refuge."
There are photos and illustrations throughout the book as well as an appendix of terms related to Winston's published research papers. Alongside Saklikar's poem "Hibernacula" is a photograph of the poet sitting on the back of a garden bench surrounded by blooms and structures in the form of large-winged bees.
Saklikar titles a poem "a moishe (To Mark)" which ends: "into the bee yard / you brought me-and so we whispered / let the song reside in us forever." Mark L. Winston says of collaborating with Saklikar, "her poetry has deepened my own thinking about the science I've done over the last forty-five years." 978-0-88971-346-8
Mary Ann Moore is a poet, and writing mentor in Nanaimo. Her last book was Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press) She blogs at apoetsnanaimo.ca
Bramah and the Beggar Boy by Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(Nightwood $26.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan
In a new fantasy novel set in the not too far-off future, a band of anti-authoritarian resisters is determined to preserve themselves and a degraded humanity against fearful odds. At stake is nothing less than planetary ecological survival.
The cast contains chiefly female lead characters and the story involves time travel via portals in the Perimeter, a huge post-ecocide territory governed by a brutal force called Consortium. Within the scores of mostly single-page verse accounts—some are longer—we encounter themes involving self and community identity, shifting tides of good and evil and what East-West philosopher Alan Watts (1915–1973) called “overcoming suffering.”
Action takes place largely in “Pacifica,” a coastal region resembling Cascadia. Language has deteriorated, but familiar names arise—Barnston Island, the Albion Ferry, Cedar Cottage, the Rentalsman and more.
Story-time begins at the Winter Portal. The earth is akilter and “spores, viruses [are] spreading.” Masks are important. Droughts, wild fires and melting ice-caps accelerate eco-change.
The parallels with current climate change disasters and our past pandemic year and a half are obvious. But in Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Bramah and the Beggar Boy, which has been ten years in the making, there’s even more societal devolution.
Something is amiss in this dystopian world—milk won’t curdle, bread won’t rise and an ominous Investigator lurks on behalf of the Consortium, tracking down dissenters to its authority. When the voices of ragamuffin beggar boys call for aid—“Turn your key, Bramah, and find us at last,” Bramah the heroine arrives packing “tools plus lasers, all the latest gadgets.”
With her tattooed arm she’s a “turner of bad odds.” Bramah, we’re told, is part-human, part-goddess, brown and beautiful, and a female locksmith. Like a character from Indic legends she comes from the “far future.” An employee of the Consortium, she can travel in time and is tasked with retrieving a valuable box. But hearing the pleas of young resisters, Bramah goes rogue.
A first critical turn occurs when Bramah and her Beggar Boy sidekick find the box and snitch the contents. Escaping through a time portal, the crafty pair regroup in a Paris cafe. The box contains documents, disks, codes, maps and a parchment scroll of stories that will unfold for future survivors in recalibrating directions for a world gone off-course.
Female elders play critical roles. When the Beggar Boy is brought to Bramah’s grandmother we see the elders’ importance as “seed savers” in a ruined ecology. On their way to visit the elder, Bramah and the boy pass across time, vast earthscapes, diverse languages and cultures.
Among the many story lines in this novel is a group of Aunties associated with “The Wishing Well” who work clandestinely in preserving archival social memory and compiling seed-stocks for climate rehabilitation. There’s loving homage paid to bee-keeping, the joy of pollination, to royal queens and honey’s nutritional goodness—reminiscent of Listening to the Bees, Saklikar’s award-winning 2018 poetry and essay collection co-written with biologist Dr. Mark Winston. Indeed, the poet ranges widely in her idea-sources: a botanical remark references a “Great Companion” echoing Robin Blaser’s phrase for poetic mentors like Dante, Pindar and Robert Duncan in his serial epic The Holy Forest. Saklikar also acknowledges her own imposing lineage of inspiring mentors—Homer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Mahabharata, The Arabian Nights and fantasy fiction masters J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, among others.
An adopted beggar-girl, Abigail shapes Part Two. She’ll learn her mother’s story from one of the Aunties and the loveliest poetry in the book comes as a hologram message to the future from her mother—reminding her little survivor girl, “I will be/so silent/I will be that space hidden/... I will be the quiet of a forest/outside the gates/...where a bird sings/liquid/two notes/dropped into morning/ice in the face of a sun/... I will be/so silent/settled along the riverbank/city with its back/to the ocean/at night/a storefront/... I will be/that silent/unending night...”
Like Bramah, Abigail becomes a “purveyor of the artful dodge,” and in borrowing from South Asian religious mythologies, Saklikar’s interconnected heroines become mutually reflective. On meeting her soul-mate Bartholomew, love enters the saga; then after a sparkling exchange of letters we’re off toward second book-land in the poet’s promised trilogy.
Saklikar writes with keen metrical discipline, depicting finely polished images in lean lines that mix manifold verse forms. Expect ballad refrains, tricky codes, romantic letters and terse corporate reports. However, the slurries of poetic fragments she constructs, while skilfully effused, are often as ambiguous as Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds. Perhaps the poet intuits this. An end-note clarifies how her “obsession with formal poetry... finds its creative tension in the investigation of the fragment fused into forms of poetry...”
By nature, fragments are discontinuous; inevitably there’s a challenge in having these clearly understood. The author does provide extensive supplementary information, including a link and a code to an external website providing further back-up to the epic. It makes for busy reading. Some could be reset up front or in-text. Nevertheless, a 300-page verse epic is a formidable achievement.
The author notes that Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first in a planned 1,000-page saga. Fans of fantasy literature and long-form poetry with a gritty ecological resonance have plenty to look forward to. 9780889714021
BCBW 2021-22
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
***
BOOKS:
children of air india: un/authorized exhibita and interjections.(Nightwood, 2013) $18.95 978-0-88971-287-4
The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press), co-edited with Wayde Compton. $18 978-1-77214-032-3
Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018), co-authored with Mark L. Winston. $22.95 9780889713468
Bramah and the Beggar Boy (Nightwood, 2021) $26.95 9780889714021
[BCBW 2022] "Air India"
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
children of air india (Nightwood $18.95)
Article (2013)
For Renée Sarojini Saklikar, wife of NDP leader Adrian Dix, the loss of a provincial election in May was far from being the worst thing that could happen to her family. In 1985, at age 23, she learned her aunt and uncle had been murdered aboard Air India Flight 182. It was the worst mass murder in Canadian history. Relatives from B.C. flew to the tiny community of Ahista, located on the coast of Ireland, between Durrus and Kilcrohane, on the Sheep's Head peninsula, where they threw wreaths into the sea. Bodies of only half of the 329 victims were recovered. Renée Sarojini Saklikar's children of air India (Nightwood $18.95) is the literary equivalent of tossing wreaths into the sea. After a 20-year investigation culminated in a high-profile trial that ended with the accused being acquitted, she has blended elegiac sequences that explore private loss and public trauma. The Air India tragedy continues to get short shrift in the public imagination given that most Canadians feel more strongly about the 9/11 attacks that killed New Yorkers. Meanwhile the County Cork Council has purchased that wreath-tossing site on the Sheep's Head peninsula and built a memorial garden-with a sundial that marks the exact minute of the tragedy. Irish locals and Indo-Canadian relatives gather there, annually, in June, to commemorate the dead. Blending poetry and prose, Saklikar has made her own monument around which readers can gather, searching for dignity and meaning. Inconspicuously erected, children of Air India is a Canadian literary sundial.
978-0-88971-287-4
Saklikar wins CAA Poetry Prize
Press Release (2014)
Nightwood Editions is pleased to announce Renée Sarojini Saklikar's book children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections ($18.95) won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, which recognizes the best full-length English-language book of poems for adults by a Canadian writer. The CAA Award for Poetry winner receives $2000 and a silver medal. In the long-held tradition of writers honouring writers, the Canadian Authors Association announced the winners of its 2014 Literary Awards at a gala reception in Orillia, Ontario on Saturday, June 21.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar was 23 years old when her aunt and uncle were murdered on June 23, 1985, in the bombing of Air India Flight 182. In her first book of poems, children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections, Saklikar presents a powerful and deeply personal collection. These poems offer a fresh perspective on a heartbreaking chapter in Canada's history-the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which killed all 329 passengers and crew, including 82 children under the age of 13.
Saklikar breaks new ground in her approach to the Canada/Air India saga. The collection is animated by a proposition: that personal and shared violence produces continuing sonar, an echolocation that finds us, even when we choose to be unaware or indifferent. These poignant poems invite us to help bear witness to an aviation disaster that continues to resonate around the world, decades after the original event.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar, whose work includes poetry and non-fiction, also writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle about her life from India to Canada, from coast to coast. Work from thecanadaproject appears in literary publications including The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Review, PRISM international, Poetry is Dead, SubTerrain, Ricepaper, CV2, Ryga: a journal of provocations, Geist and Arc Poetry Magazine and in the recent anthologies, Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest and Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia.
Introduced in 1975, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards honour Canadian writers who achieve excellence without sacrificing popular appeal in the categories of fiction, Canadian history and the poetry. Joseph Boyden was awarded the CAA Fiction Award for The Orenda (Penguin Group Canada). Charlotte Gray was named the recipient of the Lela Common Award for Canadian History for The Massey Murder: A maid, her master, and the trial that shocked a country (HarperCollins Canada). Grace O'Connell won the Emerging Writer Award for a promising writer under 30; her achievements include the novel Magnified World (Knopf Canada). The CAA Award for Poetry shortlist also included Catherine Graham, for Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects (Wolsak and Wynn Publishers), and Tom Wayman, for Winter Skin (Oolichan Books).
For more information about the Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards, refer to their website at www.canadianauthors.org.
First Poet Laureate for Surrey
Press Release (2015)
Renée Sarojini Saklikar has been selected as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Surrey. Renée is the author of children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections which won the Canadian Authors Award for best book of Canadian poetry to be published in English and was a finalist for the B.C. Book prize Dorothy Livesay award. She is also the co-editor of the anthology The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them. This anthology includes poetry performed during Lunch Poems at SFU, a poetry reading series that Renée helped to establish.
"A strong foundation of arts and culture is the hallmark of a thriving City,"; said Mayor Linda Hepner."; As Surrey's first Poet Laureate, Renée Sarojini Saklikar will creatively engage and connect with our community and will be a strong advocate for literacy and the literary arts.";
Renée is one of three National Advocates for The Writer's Union of Canada and a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Her poetry investigates, celebrates, and memorializes the poetry of place, particularly those stories integral to arrival, departure, settlement, and diaspora. Renée will work to create a legacy program of poetry-outreach that is multi-lingual and inter-cultural, in partnership with local organizations in Surrey. She is interested in furthering grass-roots connections with youth, senior, and community groups.
"We're excited to welcome Renée as the Poet Laureate for Surrey,"; said Meghan Savage, Information Services Librarian at Surrey Libraries and Poet Laureate Project Coordinator. "Renée demonstrates a strong passion and enthusiasm for connecting the people of Surrey through poetry.";
