Unknown Soldier
Unknown Soldier by Seni Seneviratne, published by Peepal Tree Press Limited in 2019, is a poignant collection of poetry that delves into the life of the poet’s father, a young man from colonial Sri Lanka who served as a radio operator in an all-white platoon during the North African desert war from 1939 to 1945. This edition comprises 97 pages and is presented in English, offering readers an exploration of the complex emotions surrounding war, family, and memory, inspired by a series of photographs of the poet’s father.
The poems in this collection engage with themes of male camaraderie and the casual racism experienced during wartime, while also reflecting on the deep affection captured in the photographs. Through imaginative recreations, the poet connects personal memories with broader narratives of migration and belonging, contrasting the father’s successful integration into Yorkshire with the tragedies faced by migrants in contemporary Europe. The work is characterized by its lucid language and intricate structure, weaving together imagery and humor, particularly through the voice of the mother, who playfully asserts her presence in the poet’s recollections.
Official synopsis Publisher
This is a collection of huge depth and resonance. Its stimulus is a collection of photographs of the poet’s late father, then a young man, originally from colonial Sri Lanka, who was serving as a radio operator in an otherwise all white platoon in the 1939-45 desert war in North Africa. The stimulus for these poems is a collection of photographs taken of the poet’s father, originally from colonial Sri Lanka, who was serving as a radio operator in an otherwise all white platoon in the 1939-45 desert war in North Africa. As for so many who came back from war to start or resume a family life, there was a great gulf of silence, an unwillingness to speak of those experiences. The collection begins and ends in an imaginative recreation of the life suggested in those photographs, many reproduced in this collection. There is connection with a much-loved father, but also a sense of the unknowable. Speaking in the voice of the father and of the unknown photographer, poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed “Snowball” in his lens. From this imaginative core, poems move out to make connections with the remembered and known life of a father who died too soon, to self-reflections on the poet as remembrancer, creator and actor in the world. There are moving poems on the meaning of inherited objects – a paper-knife, letters – and inherited ways of being – the birdwatching that provides a rich source of imagery. The personal moves out to the resonances of what was, in its origins, a story of migration. Here the father’s success in finding of a home in Yorkshire is seen to contrast sharply with the tragedies of migrant deaths in the face of fortress Europe. This is a work of great beauty, whose lucid simplicity of language is married to a rich complexity of structure and the bird-flight of images that connect poem to poem. There is humour, too, in the revenant voice of the mother who inserts herself into the poet’s memory and demands in her “broad Yorkshire vowels [.] `Why is your dad getting all the attention?’”
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