Gavin Barrett’s poetry collection
Understan takes the reader on a beautiful kaleidoscopic journey from Goa, India, throughout the various places he has lived, including Toronto and environs. The poems sojourn with his enduring love for his wife and his love for humanity. The poems in this multifaceted collection celebrate and satirize through lush description.
Understan manifests Barrett’s multiple influences from T.S. Eliot to Arun Kolatkar in poems inspired by family, faith (Catholicism), racism, and social injustice.
Barrett is the founder and co-curator of the east-end Toronto-based Tartan Turban Secret Readings, the focus of which is giving emerging visible minority writers a stage. The name of Barrett’s reading series acknowledges the multiple strands of his identity: born in Bombay (now Mumbai) of Anglo-Indian and Goan-East African parentage, he has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College (in Bombay) and an M.A. in English Literature from Bomb