Kubrick Poetry • April• Life Lines

時間 Time：2013/4/28 (Sunday) 4:00pm-5:00pm

地點 Venue： 油麻地 Kubrick電影中心一樓講廳

主持 Moderators：Polly Ho & Adam Cheung

詩人 Poets：Shahilla Shariff

Life Lines is Shahilla Shariff's first collection of poetry. Drawing on her life experiences, it explores themes of love, grief, dislocation and transition. Her work addresses the vast and unruly dimensions of loss – loss of home, of time, of people, of self – and probes the raw and uncertain trajectory of mourning along with the complex interplay of memory, faith and fate. The poems span continents, generations and cultures, exposing the collisions and contradictions of East and West which underlie her own personal narrative.

Shahilla Shariff was born in Kenya and is Canadian. A fourth-generation East African, she spent her early childhood in a multi-generational Indian-Muslim household in Dar-es-Salaam. Her family later emigrated to Canada. She was educated at Harvard College,Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She has been a practising corporate lawyer for over twenty years. She has lived in Hong Kong since 1993.

Circle of Love

(Polly Ho)

To start with, Hong Kong is a metropolitan meeting point for poets.

The circle of love began when we had lunch at Mido Restaurant. There, we started dramatizing plan to have institutions like FBI and CIA, filled with occasional laughter, joined later by Madeleine. At three o’clock, we gathered again in Kubrick and formed a circle of literature. Steven Schroder and Madeleine Slavick who no longer base in Hong Kong, stopped over Hong Kong for 2-3 weeks. Polly kicked off the reading with the song Circle of Life in Lion King. After playing the song with her iPhone, she read the English version but withheld the German one as she was not yet prepared. Steve and Madeleine took turn to read their selected poems. They had prepared themselves so well with published books and manuscripts. They selected poems of the same theme and pass the ball to the next.  Madeleine seemed to like this reciprocal game. Meanwhile, Steve expressed the experience of cultural shock when he moved back to Chicago because he no longer used to living there. To Madeleine, she felt she had landed yesterday but had to leave the next day. The larger the circle, the shorter the time it is.

Through poetry, we feel much connected.

(photos by Paul Wan)