The Cowherd’s Son
A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir, Kundiman Poetry Prize Winner

What was going through your head when you were writing the poems in the manuscript you submitted for the Poetry Prize? What were your inspirations and motivations?
I wrote the majority of the poems in The Cowherd’s Son while putting together The Taxidermist’s Cut(Four Way Books), my first book. The poems in The Cowherd’s Son focus on the religious and mythological traditions that I have inherited as a second generation Indo-Caribbean. A patchwork of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian shape the tone of this collection.
I was inspired by my Aji’s songs and stories. My poems are a kind of translation of her poetic. I attempt to cycle her songs again but from my own particular generation and idiom. I am inspired by the poems of Bhojpuri folk music, Kabir, Mirabai, Sudesh Mishra, and Rooplal Monar. American poets like Roger Sedarat, Agha Shahid Ali, Craig Santos Perez, Eduardo C. Corral, Rigoberto González, and so many others also inflect my craft decisions and my lyric impulses.
When it came to putting the manuscript together, it was Oliver de la Paz at the 2013 Kundiman retreat who told me to pull out the poems about mythology from my taxidermy poems. I couldn’t just abandon this clutch that sung of the coolie diaspora — I still felt them move me. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke sat with me on the floor of Sinclair Library at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa and together we stitched the poems together.
Read more at Kundiman.

