CAROLYNE WRIGHT & ROBERT McNAMARA
Tuesday, November 25 at 7:30 p.m.

Presented with support from POETS & WRITERS and WHITE PINE PRESS. Tonight we present a rare opportunity to hear English translations of poetry originally written in Bengali as Carolyne Wright and Robert McNamara, two highly regarded Seattle poets, teachers and translators, read from recently published books. Carolyne Wright reads from Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press). "You cannot read these poems without being transformed by the hot breath of the gods, the eternal sweetness of flowers, and the soul of this powerful poet as she mesmerizes you with her alert wisdom, her gift of song. This is one of the finest collections of poetry I have come across in recent years. You need this book." - Joy Harjo. Carolyne Wright's most recent collection of her own poetry, A Change of Maps, was a finalist for the Idaho Prize. With her this evening is University of Washington professor Robert McNamara, reading from The Cat Under the Stairs, Poems of Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay (Eastern Washington University Press), translations produced in collaboration with the poet. "This translation, from Bengali, of the work of Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, faithfully captures this major contemporary Kolkata poet's quietly witty, urbane, and often irreverent voice. Mukhopadhyay's sensibility is shadowed, and enlivened, by the turbulent but always vital history of Kolkata ... This volume, one of the rare efforts by Western poets to translate Bengali literature, is a valuable addition to that slowly growing body of work that should help to bring non-Bengali readers to Bengali culture for the first time." - Carolyne Wright.

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