Review Comments

ABOUT HER POETRY

• I like her cool plain way of speaking and the sensitivity of her ordinary imagery  which is lifted to other heights by such intimate perceptions of reality.

James Kirkup

• I loved the work of Daisy Abey. This from Winter Day

The moors are black this winter day

Grass blighted beneath sweeping winds

Passed times far frozen far beyond

Imagination’s furthest leap.

 Some of the finest pastoral poetry that I’ve read for quite some time.

 CARILLON - Idris Caffrey   FEBRUARY 2003

 

• The language is restrained and precise. The poems are vignettes illustrating the larger world through the small details perceptively portrayed through the poet's sensibilities. The stanzas progress calmly and coolly, forming a backdrop to emotions and descriptions.' - Polly Bird in NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE
  
   
• 'These poems say exactly what they mean with their sparse drama and encouragement of the truth.' - Patricia Prime in NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE
  
   
• This collection [ACROSS THE VIRGIN MOORS] works well around, what is in the main, a collective theme of nostalgia tinged with sadness.... Read individually, or better still collectively, these fluently accessible, and always lyrical, poems by Daisy Abey create poignant images that live on in the mind and more than repay the modest £2.50 investment.' - Brian G D'Arcy in LEEDS POETRY WEEKLY, June 2003
  
   

• Daisy Abey’s poems are really special. She has a love for nature.

Dr Virginia Hunter

• Daisy Abey's poems are difficult in a different way. She too uses graphic language but sometimes it is incoherent. Take the opening stanza of her first poem. Time.

Time gushes like floods through a burst dam

A zigzagging heat wave through bones and veins

Dwindling red, rumbles and erupts again

Winter pain of wincing wind.

 

Letter from Mars vividly pictures the outburst of life on the red planet and in 'Burning Smoke' the poet's penchant for densely-packed imagery is used to great effect.

ROUNDY HOUSE REVIEW - Herbert Williams  December 2001

• Daisy Abey: Under any Sky

Dalsy Abey’s poetry has earlier been praised in Pennine Platform for its vividness and ability to leap from image to image. Here, in Under Any Sky, it is seen at greater length and in a more permanent format and we travel at length through an energized world. Although a global poet she is never merely a tourist-poet, since travel often has a spiritual dimension enriched by Buddhist perspectives as in the book's title poem:

The road to Kandahar stretched from

Our fingertips to eternity

In a sea of endless desert.

 

PENNINE PLATFORM REVIEW

Dr Ken Smith

• DAISY ABEY   In Exile and Under Any Sky

It is her love of Yorkshire that comes through, even when she described its bleakness. She is a good transcriber of information, observer and a changer of moods, as in Haworth Moor where  Penistone Hill overcast/Emptied the cobbled streets. I was impressed by the fluid descriptions, the detail and sentiment in her poem Odeon.

Odeon is my favourite. It leaves from by the Odeon – Marble Arch to go to Leeds, and the coach turned Khyber Pass bends ….over the rivers Aire and Ouse…bursting their banks.

Geoff Stevens

POETRY QUARTERLY REVIEW

• Daisy Abey is bi-lingual having been born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Britain in 1965. This certainly strengthens her work. She has a fine vocabulary. The poems tell of her old life in Asia and her new life in England.

LINKS SPRING 2002

• Daisy Abey’s Under Any sky reminds me that we live in a small world and Afghanistan is not far away.

Benjamin Zephaniah

• DAISY ABEY: SILENT PROTEST

A collection of poetry from Sri Lankan born poet, Daisy Abey, who has made her home in Leeds, the town which has inspired many of her poems. She is able to draw parallels between Asia and the Pennines with ease.

‘Stranger in a new green world

I wander alone along unseen tracks…’

 

OLD YORKSHIRE SPRING 2002

• Her similes are fecund, bold and risky, her metaphors are daring and striking. Let her structure and balance and design more as in Destiny and Peacefully Away which are wholly unified statements not processions or pageants of imagery.

Dr. Fred Grubb

• She has caught the mood of Haworth in history and today, very well.

Never Bury Poetry   

• Daisy Abey: Silent Protest

Daisy Abey’s poems have a quiet poise and can seduce a reader with a seeming artlessness that belies technical mastery. Poems like Tree Goddess yoke the tensions of living/connecting two different cultures and landscapes with gentle-handed subtlety. She’s a good poet, always worth reading, yielding up more.

Mark Floyer

KONFLUENCE

• Daisy Abey - Kirkgate Market (the Leeds Connection) illustrates her strength. An arresting opening. A stranger walked into an anthill where there are pyramids of fruit, vegetables and flowers from east and west.

Mangoes, bananas and coconuts

Bronze tanned by tropical suns

Tulips, daffodils, red rose rings

Springing scented snowdrops.

 

A sensuous appreciation of the exotic meeting of East and West.

 THE JOURNAL

 ABOUT HER PROSE
 

• LIKE THE WIND

   A WHOLESOME NOVEL ON LANKAN AND UK SCENE

  by K.S. Sivakumaran

  I like novels written by Lankans in English. These include writers abroad who were originally from Lanka. They live in various parts of the world. However at least two such writers who live outside the country are sometimes overrated at the expense of other writers that live here and outside. As a reader with cultivated taste and one without any academic pretensions I appreciate very much the writings of others. In my columns I have often written my responses to the works of Lankans.

   

  Belatedly I read a novel titled Like the Wind which was originally published in the U.K in 2003 and reprinted in Lanka in 2005 by Vijitha Yapa Publications. The writer is Daisy Abeygunasekera (nee Wimalagunaratna) who has shortened her name to suit the western reader as Daisy Abbey.

   

  As a practice I always include some details of the authors for the benefit of readers who might not have heard of such writers. So, let me cull out the note on Daisy Abey as published in the huge novel of 334 pages.

   

  “D A was born near Matara and was educated at the university of Peradeniya from 1960-1963. In 1965 Daisy migrated to the U.K. where, for three decades, she worked and raised her family. She worked for Zurich Insurance and then for 17 years with the homeless in the inner city, helping vulnerable people with psychiatric and addiction problems, many of whom had been in prison or worked as prostitutes to regain their lives. Now she devotes her time to writing. The sadness of separation from her homeland, juxtaposed with the experience of urban poverty in the West, has combined to make her one of the contemporary Sri Lanka’s leading writers.”

   

  We learn that she writes poetry too and the following publications stand to her credit: City of Leeds, Letter to a Friend, Under any Sky, In Exile, Silent Protest and On Penine Heights.

   

  There are 49 Chapters in the novel and the story is interestingly woven covering the social, cultural and even political situations in both countries – Lanka and the U.K. As such it is a valuable document written in a refined and polished language to understand the scene a few decades ago. Younger readers in the country and foreign readers would have an insight into the workings in the minds of the main characters and the capture of locales in almost poetic language. This is one reason I liked the fiction very much.

   

  The blurb in the back cover of the book says something about the novel, but it is inadequate and there is much more to that. But for the present let us see what the fiction presents:

   

  “When newly- weds Rupa and Aruna arrive in swinging sixties London, their marriage soon stars to crumble and Rupa finds herself a single parent in a northern inner city. Daisy Abey’s brilliant novel alternates between exotic scenes set in a village in the jungle (to quote a title of Leonard Woolf’s) and the very different worlds of London and Leeds. When Rupa meets poet Chris Hunter it seems her problems have ended but this is far from the case. Rupa’s difficulties are compounded by tensions between conflicting customs of east and west.”

   

  A few critics abroad have acclaimed this novel and one (Debjani Chatterjee) goes to the extent of finding some similarities between Abey’s novel and the American Classic Gone with the Wind. But I would agree with him when he says: Relationships are important in this book, are plot and dialogue. Among other things, it tells the story of a journey from innocence to experience…Like Scarlet in Gone with the Wind, Abey’s heroine too is a strong woman and a survivor”

   

  Another critic (Barry Tebb) goes further to say that the “first challenge to Leonard Woolf’s timeless classic comes from a Sri Lankan woman émigré”

   

  I am not sure whether Abey studied in the Sinhala medium at Peradeniya, but astonishingly she writes in measured and appropriate English with finesse.

   

  I would agree with the critic that “the flow of language and the stylistic flashes abounding in the novel cannot but make one wonder how Daisy Abey –like the late great Joseph Conrad- has made her second language the medium of her great gift.”

   

  If the writer is presently living in Lanka, we would expect her to write a sequel to her Like the Wind or else write a fresh novel in capturing the present Lanka with all its complexities.

   

  It took a long time for me to relish and feel and analyze each chapter, but it was worth the exercise.

   

  THE ISLAND newspaper Sri Lanka 7 May 2008

   

  K.S. Sivakumaran is a Freelance media critic. His columns appear in Sri Lankan daily and Sunday editions.

  sivakumaranks@yahoo.com

   

   

•  Proposed, deposed and juxtaposed

  Like the Wind
  Author: Daisy Abey
  Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo
  First Sri Lanka reprint 2005
  pp 324

  THIS novel by Daisy Abey first appeared in the UK in 2003. It was well received and avidly read, not only by the vast Sri Lankan community there but also acclaimed by the critics as a most kaleidoscopic account of a Sri Lankan woman's transposition and how she comes to grips with Westernised society.

  It is also, to us, a faithful portrayal of a university-educated village girl, ready to rebel, ready to do battle with her own family that is so steeped in archaic thinking and tradition, anxious to break out and be her own person.

  Rupa is trapped. Her mother Dikwella Hamine is the typical village and walauwa matriarch, rigid in her ways and proud of her husband's ancestry. She and her husband Loku Mahatmaya live in the "Maha Gedera" - the ancestral home that Loku Mahatmaya had inherited down the family line, from his great great grandfather, a faithful follower of the king.

  Domineering mother

  Loku Mahatmaya was not happy with his wife. She could be most obstreperous at times and she laid down the law. She was also determined that Rupa must marry, and that a lying Kapurala find for her daughter a suitable partner.

  "We have to do everything according to tradition. Don't forget our family history and our special relationship with the king of the country! We don't want to hear the slightest adverse comment."

  And Rupa whips back "What's this you always go on and on about, this relative of ours and the king of the country. We don't have kings any more!..... We live in the present, mother, not in history."

  Finally, Rupa agrees to marry Aruna who lives in England. It is the only way she can escape from her domineering mother. Let us take a typical exchange.

  Mother: "People think that it's our fault that we keep you at home until you're behind the suitable age for marriage. You mustn't forget your religion and family background. There's no need to tell you about our caste and all the rest."

  Rupa: "You've started again, mother, about our family relationship to a king. If you are a Buddhist you must marry a Buddhist, not a Hindu Tamil. I don't believe why we have to believe all this rubbish blindly. Mother I'm sorry but I can't accept the caste system. It's unnatural and silly."

  Mother: "How dare you speak in such a way? You're a disgrace to our family. You'll accept the next bridegroom Kapurala brings and I'll hear no more of this nonsense."

  Father: "Your mother is right. We want the best for you. You are young and just don't understand these things."

  Rupa: "No, it's you who don't understand, and your generation with traditions that no more than disguise a form of slavery and servitude - those are finished! Freedom to choose the person you want to marry is what young people want. That's what I had an education for, so that I can make my own decisions."

  Rupa wins through. She will marry Aruna, go to England and join him there. Dikwelle Hamine is bitter. She will go down fighting.

  Tropical dawns

  Aruna shows Rupa around London on the very first day of her arrival. Where were the large white-washed houses with red-tiled roofs, the coconut palms slanting to the sea, the tropical dawns with their clamouring birdsong, the sunset skies rampant with colour? Such a vast difference between East and West.

  How would she organise herself in this unknown country when thoughts of home came crowding in? Here the people were reserved and uncommunicative, their lives cut off from families and neighbours. She tells Aruna.

  "Now I'm beginning to see the differences between Ceylon and England, I still don't know anybody who lives around here. The lady next door says the same thing whenever I see her, either that the weather's freezing or warm in the mornings, and she comes back tired at night and closes her front door as fast as she can if I'm in the garden.... I'm not used to wearing leg warmers, gloves, boots and thick woollens.... I don't want to stay at home doing nothing...."

  The prospect of new happiness bloomed when Aruna decided to sell up and actually drive all the way back to Sri Lanka where he wanted to start a motor car business and never return to England, but Rupa got pregnant and, "In his mind Aruna started to blame Rupa for his depression.

  If they had to occupy themselves for the next three or four years bringing up a baby, all his hopes would be ruined. Aruna had some kind of fear and suspicion about Rupa's pregnancy.

  Rupa's agenda

  "This isn't the right time for a new addition to our family," (he thought secretly). Rupa will spend all her time with the baby. Babies fall ill. They cry. Some parents have to suffer, even having to give up their jobs and have sleepless nights.

  It's an end to freedom in life and a complete waste of time. Who wants to stay at home and spend all their time looking after babies and children? I'll be too old to start my own motor business by the time we go back to Ceylon."

  But Rupa was pursuing her own agenda - classes at a Technical College, then an application to London University, her closeness and admiration for her tutor-poet at the Tech.

  The author builds up story with a slow-step rhythm. With a baby girl to think of, Aruna's heady plans seem to mock him. One sees the crack slowly widening. They are now simply tolerating each other.

  When Rupa goes to visit her parents with her daughter, Aruna stays back. When she returns he simply ignores her. When she tells him that he has impregnated her again he descends into an abyss of panic. He welcomes the arrival of his new son but divorces himself from family, love and caring.

  He has an affair with another woman after he finds work far from home, then has encounters with prostitutes. He moves out of home, begins business in another city and Rupa turns to her poet-tutor - the only man she could count on. He proposes marriage but she has to go back to the Maha Gedera where her father lies dying.

  Is there solace at the end of this well-spun tale? The author leaves us to deduce whether what will be, will be. Kumara, an old friend of Rupa's university days meets her after a great gap of years. He lives in the UK too. They had been so drawn to each other when they were students together.

  He says: "I hadn't forgotten you, Rupa, but I could never find you. I still visit Ceylon, at least once every couple of years. I always call in at the university and see some of our old friends..... Are you well enough to go back to London with me, Rupa?"

  They sat together on the banks of the Thames, lost in a shared unconscious paradise.

  One woman's sage - and in the end, in Kumara's flat while a distant clock chimes midnight, Rupa is once again at the crossroads of her life.

  The novel explores with tenderness and understanding, probes the minds of its characters with delicate fingers and we have in our hands, the life of a woman proposed to, deposed, then juxtaposed between loyalty and bitterness, reaching out for understanding and making yet another turning that will bring her love and give herself to love. Is she right or wrong? So many tears and fears, so much drama and, as the author says finally, "Which way, Rupa, which way?"

  Carl Muller.

  THE ISLAND newspaper (Sri Lanka)

   

• LIKE THE WIND BY DAISY ABEY

  THE FIRST CHALLENGE TO LEONARD WOOLFE’S TIMELESS CLASSIC COMES FROM A SRI LANKAN WOMAN EMIGRÉE

  The only novel I can compare Like the Wind with is Leonard Woolfe’s peerless Village in the Jungle. Rural life in Ceylon – as it was when the author was born – had changed hardly at all since the beginning of the Raj.

  Daisy Abey was a poet before she turned to the novel and the opening sentences could only have been written by a poet of stature.

  ‘Fragrance of blossom on the tall mango tree in the garden and the smell of damp grass mixed together filled the sky to the stars through evening clouds. The fine raindrops touched the mango leaves with a cracking sound. The full moon in a corner of the sky was washed away by faded sunshine; the hills, wrapped in the invisible touch of the night’s darkness have entered the world of sleep with the retiring sun.’

  The reader is introduced to a ‘world within a world’ – unforgettable characters like the matchmaker with his constant journeying and hugely funny, expensive and inept attempts to earn his fee.

  ‘How hard we’ve tried to arrange someone suitable for this child. I can’t remember how many people have visited this house since the day she came home from university, there must have been dozens. It’s all so pointless. We just waste time and money on matchmakers. They don’t care whether it is a man without arms and legs, as long as a marriage can be arranged and they get their commission! I have no idea what’s going to happen. Either the men aren’t happy or she won’t agree with the proposals for one reason or another, there’s always something, Venus and Mars in the wrong place, the horoscopes don’t match! This man is fat and short that one thin and tall; dark or light skinned, whatever nothing’s ever right! Hmm…. We can never give the kind of dowry some of them ask. Money isn’t something that grows on trees or you find under rocks. You remember that Morris Agent in Galle? When his son was proposed for Rupa, the very first thing they asked from the matchmaker was how much money she had in her bank account! They try to wipe their dirty hands on our faces.’

  The flow of language and the stylistic flashes abounding in the novel cannot but make one wonder how Daisy Abey - like the late great Joseph Conrod – has made her second language the medium of her great gift. There is a finely established nostalgia for the last days of the Raj juxtaposed with the intertwined sub-plot of the experiences of an immigrant in London of the swinging sixties. The central character, Rupa, moves to the North of England with its industrial decay and crumbling inner city. Aruna, her husband, sinks into madness and routine infidelity while Rupa somehow manages to keep going, lonely and alone. She is befriended by the hilarious Eileen, an alcoholic ex-prostitute who tells her what street life is really like.

  ‘You don’t know me Rupa, Leeds is my home. I know every inch of that red light district. I don’t have to ask anybody where the turning is to join a junction or how to find a nightclub or a bar anywhere in Leeds. The thing is Rupa, you mustn’t let anyone see that you’re a stranger in the area, even if you haven’t a clue about where you are. Those girls have to know exactly what they’re doing when they get involved in the game. It’s a business and they don’t have to fall in love with the man. The goal is to earn as much as you can. Most girls I know have families to support, but there’s never been anything like this before! Marijuana, heroin, LSD, cocaine: they’re freely available these days. I told my girls how to understand a man just by glancing at his face. They shouldn’t be frightened to ask one or two tricky questions. They’ve got to be tough, not delicate and sensitive. Then they’ve to ask the man about the cash! If the man doesn’t like to discuss money, look for someone else!’

  Rupa couldn’t believe how brave Eileen was, standing like a heroine in front of her, a goddess to help you when you’re in trouble. Eileen hated men who used women like old footballs. She looked at them with a sickening feeling. If you shake an apple tree, a shower of fruit falls on the ground. If you dug out Eileen’s past and her involvements your mind would land in an endless tangle.’

  Finally Rupa finds some hope of happiness with Chris Hunter, an Oxford poet whose wife has left him for a rich American. Love’s course is never smooth and out of Rupa’s past comes Kumara, a friend from her university days who she thought was dead. She is left and leaves us in a quandary: both men propose but we are left with the final unanswered question ‘Which way Rupa, which way?’ Hopefully this immensely powerful writer will gain the fame she has so long deserved and reward her readers with a sequel.

  Barry Tebb

   

• Her prose is written with a poet's acumen and eye for sensitive details.
  Jeremy Reed
   
• Daisy Abey’s ‘Like the Wind’ is well written and with a good flow; it is very well edited. She has an instinct for colour and the ability to ground the writing in specifics with detailed information. She demonstrates a very effective use of conversations, and she refuses to make ‘an easy ending’. Her central character is somewhat naïve. The writing is grounded in reality; the metaphors are effective and unusual, the writing is often elegiac. There is a sense of ‘the people’ in the central character, and a sense of hallucinatory intensity superimposed on the real world. Curious, superb phrase making.

Dr. Simon Jenner

• Daisy Abey, Like the Wind

    The poet's eye for detail, symbolic acumen and lyrical dexterity enhance Abey's prose. There are exquisite scenes set in the jungle villages of the Orient, juxtaposed with the gritty urban existence of Leeds and London. Ceylon is recalled and recreated with fondness; the intimacies of relationships are sincerely and sensitively related. Without wanting to give too much of the subject matter away, anyone who enjoys the exotic setting of the Indian sub-continent or the earthy realities of life in Mike Leigh films will enjoy this captivating, enthralling book.

Sonja McGarr

The Black Mountain Review

•  Daisy Abey, Like the Wind

A Conflict of Values

Abey appreciates the rural life and describes in detail the hard work that makes up the rural lifestyle. The author also brings to light the problems of Asian immigrants who are caught up in eastern and western cultural strings and often face the dilemma of choosing between the value systems. Being cut off from the support of families, they are faced with various difficulties and need to be strong to build a life from almost nothing.

Esther Williams 

THE SUNDAY TIMES (SRI LANKA)

SUNDAY OCTOBER 19, 2003

 

• Like the Wind, Daisy Abey

 For half a century now South Asian writers have excelled at writing novels in English. Most readers are familiar with the writers of Indian origin among them; novelists like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry and many others have been regularly receiving awards for their fiction.  But in recent years they have been joined by Sri Lankan writers based in Britain. A Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera have produced wonderful novels that have deservedly won prizes. Daisy Abey’s debut novel is a rich addition to this growing body of literature.

 Like that great American classic, Gone with the Wind, Abey’s Like the Wind is a family saga and it is also a big book – big in length and in its panoramic scope. The novel moves between rural Sri Lanka and urban England. Leeds is described with gritty realism and village life in Sri Lanka with nostalgia.  

I look forward to Abey’s next novel.

 Dr. DEBJANI CHATTERJEE

 

• South Leed’s cultural heritage is alive and well in Beeston where a Sri Lankan born poet is chronicling her Yorkshire experiences. Like many poets Daisy Abey draws influence from her surroundings, but through a diverse cultural background, she manages to give her topics in unique spin. South Leeds has provided her much inspiration.
   South Leeds Observer   

• LIKE THE WIND

  Daisy Abey’s LIKE THE WIND is a successful exercise in the establishment and maintaining of a powerful level of character and situation. It is a wide ranging, ambitious, literary novel, as well as a reflective narrative with two major themes: the personal story of Rupa and Aruna, although much more particularly that of Rupa, and a consideration of culture clash. It is also a pen portrait of the sixties. A very effective mix with a powerful contemporary resonance.

  It stirs inevitable reflections upon the many difficulties of our times, upon the meeting of East and West and perhaps a feeling that on the whole the world has in some ways moved on, in terms of perception at least, since then; and in other ways quite the reverse. This is a lively, original and readable literary novel. The dialogue is particularly well crafted, the characters are all believable and it is written with drive and conviction.

  Mark Sykes

  Publisher’s reader

   

  
   

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