About the Book
The essays and transcripts of Dilip Chitre brought together here are valuable in themselves as they offer a commentary on the Indian sense of tradition and the contemporary attitudes to literature. Every piece is of interest in itself. But, their greater worth lies in that they articulate the perspective of one of our most admirable poets on many issues that mattered to him. Taken together, they provide a basis for fathoming his poetry and should help us in making a more nuanced sense of it. Chitre was a fascinating poet, but it is not possible to say that his poetry was easily accessible to most of his readers. Like W. B. Yeats, he weaves in his poems experiences that arise in a given moment (such as the felling of a tree in his father’s house) together with many layers of timeless human quests and anxieties. He brings together silence and euphoria in an imagistic mix that is difficult to name with any precision. It is hence that this
volume of his comments, essays, lectures and other texts should be of importance for the lovers of Dilip Chitre’s literary works.
– Ganesh N Devy
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Covering a range of subjects, mainly to do with poetry, its daily interventions, its work, this book adds to the selections of Adil Jussawalla’s prose that have appeared before: in Maps for a Mortal Moon, and in I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky. In his chapter on Jussawalla in a forthcoming book, Vidyan Ravinthiran says ‘[His} time-shifts don’t feel erratic because his prose only becomes inexact when to do so seems the only option – when it comes to resisting subliminal pressures. Every sentence is saturated with thought, changes are rung on prior phrases, in a manner inspired by real-world vexations but not without an element of self-relishing play.’
Poetrywala is happy to offer you more such prose.
‘To observe, to give witness, to hold in the memory the bereaved cow, the boy who has come to deliver the groceries, the poet in transit, the little boy who wet his pants laughing and who wept because a bird died, all these pass under the Jussawalla scanner, all these are transformed by the act of writing. Jussawalla’s fight against the Indian predilection for amnesia is relentless. He will not let you forget.’ – Jerry Pinto, from his Introduction in Maps for a Mortal Moon
‘Jussawalla’s curiosity is patently omnivorous and extends far into many disciplines and knowledges, drawing not least on Parsi, Hindu and Christian sources, science and social science, local politics or birdwatching. A continual subtheme throughout is the memory of Britain and Europe in the post-war years… considered not from an outsider’s point of view but with the deepest sympathy.’
– Vivek Narayanan, from his Introduction in I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky
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About the Book
Via Savargaon Khurd is Dinkar Dabhade’s third novel. This novel focuses on the joys, pains, and the social issues in the lives of the rural dwellers. The writer brings to light the dilemmas, poverty and the dominance the poor suffer. The sorry plight of the farmer who faces a drought year after year; the status of women in the male-dominated society and the rampant exploitation of the weak which is prevalent.
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Broomrider’s book of the dead
About the Book
Mukta Sambrani’s The woman in this room isn’t lonely is a book of surprising intensity and imagination. Sambrani has a lyricism and fanciful imagination seldom seen in English-language poetry in recent decades. A poem about a man and woman in bed is anything but sentimental. Sambrani’s economy, independence of mind, hard-headedness and irony combine into a rapidly dramatic scene, which within twelve lines becomes grotesquely comic…By now there is a tradition in Indian poems of the coming of poetry as something mysterious. Sambrani’s version is totally unexpected. Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry in English. Mukta Sambrani’s poems in Broomrider’s book of the dead are notable for their extreme strangeness. The book-length sequence is presented as the working manuscript of its fictional protagonist, Anna Albuquar, whose project is to ‘renegotiate the idea of authorship.’ There are asides, hesitations, false starts, instructions to the reader, and throughout, a steadfast regard for language. Jeet Thayil in Fulcrum and Bloodaxe book of contemporary Indian poets Broomrider’s Book of the Dead…is experimental in every sense… a crowded collage and an eloquent concoction that will make you look up all the references it states or implies…Sambrani said that her protagonist was obsessed with capturing memory “beyond constraints of time and place, beyond decay, illness and the failing of the body. She is obsessed with writing about writing. I am curious about the architecture of our experience. As we move toward a world that is hyper-digitised, our psyches become more and more of an orchestration of fragments of media, sights, sounds, words and visuals. Anna’s writing leans back to lean forward. It captures the history of writing through writing in a world that constructs itself out of fragments of media.Lora Tomas in The Sunday Guardian
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The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002–2022
About the Book
“Mazer, along with his northeastern companions Nikolayev and Kapovich – of the further norths and further easts – make jubilant singing verse as they step through the western wreckage. This must be remembered, say the only poets who’ll matter, so I must write in the ways of memory.” — Glyn Maxwell, from the Preface
“These poems are like trees that contain and protect and conceal themselves from themselves. Each wears a rough coat over the sap, the heart, the rainwater and scars. In so many ways the bark of a tree is a scroll with its messages written out of and into its experience. Mazer’s poems know they are beautiful the way the wooden rills on a tree are elegant, made of history, of romance and pride.” — Fanny Howe
“Ben Mazer is a true inheritor of John Ashbery’s legacy, specifically the Ashbery of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Like that classic of American poetry, The Ruined Millionaire ironically also suits the contemporary European scene. In translation, Mazer’s new selected poems could just as easily fit on a shelf of the best contemporary Polish or French poetry. Anglophone readers are lucky to have them available to us first.” — John Hennessy
“When Shakespeare meets Ben Mazer at the Mermaid Tavern he will hand Ben this book. ‘Shakespherian’ the Bard will say. ‘And more.’ Another poet at the end of the bar will nod and remark ‘There are No Dry Salvages there.’ Then Will will read ‘Monsieur Barbary Brecht’ to all and they will all be surprised by joy. You will be too when you read these poems: matchless, immortal, and, like all great poetry, unexplainable.” — Joe Green
“‘Start with the rain’: there is a great deal of rain in Ben Mazer’s poetry, often in darkness and whipped by wind. One might speak of a poetic of the torrential, given the irresistible forward sweep of his poems as they move through overlapping territories of memory and history and dream. He advances through the damp corridors of a foundered world, in which the debris (and the vocabulary and the contentions) of centuries has piled up, and the voices of poets and movie actors and a multitude of others re-echo like displaced wraiths. There are constant surprises—cascades of rhyme and apparitions from a history become ghostly, like ‘Caligari, tortured in oblong angles, / beer garden, mental institute, who mangles / memory’—but no matter how allusive or wildly improvisational, no matter how extraordinarily profuse in their range of reference, the lines are never digressive. The past woven into their ‘deep syntax / of auditory visuality’ is a living past: they exist in an urgent present, whether ‘driving thus into the heart of pain’ or momentarily perceiving Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the last reel of Top Hat, ‘looming and large as any of the designs of God.’ Whatever elements become part of this poetry are distilled with sustained intensity into one substance, a music appropriate to ‘that hour / when memory settles / on the evening / darkness its liquid / history of masks.'” — Geoffrey O’Brien“‘In a soup you never know / what you’ll run into next. All the ingredients repeat, / but you encounter some of them for the first time.’ This is the savory gumbo out of which Ben Mazer has made his poems. At times maddeningly elliptical, at times this ‘ellipticality’ is what moves or tickles or interests you most. The editor of Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, and John Crowe Ransom (among others) is himself a poet very much worth savoring.” — Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems.
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“The year’s most essential book of poetry.” — Michael Londra in SpoKe
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All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)
About the Book
Dear Sanjeev,
I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity
in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too. That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence. What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life. Of course, I think it's significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
Yours
Hemant Divate
August 28, 2004 -
Where Is the Mouth of That Word?
About the Book
I breathed. I looked up. I saw her standing in the line of fire, “simply standing/on the last line of
this page”, asking, as she looked me in the eye, “Where are you reading from?”And that, dear readers, who are about to encounter Maryam’s poems for the first time, is the
question.
You can Google her, you can hear her speak 1 , you can explore her intersecting engagements as an essayist, translator, and academic.
But first, you can find her here, as I did, in a selection of her poems – from early to later, from the spoken word to the “vocal infection of the page”, from rant to reflection, plea to command.
You could, in obeyance, “Turn the page, and leave!”
You could be sentenced
to an expired word:
(Silence)You could hear the tanin (echo) of Sepehri’s hich (nothingness) reverberating at the same frequency with which you see Dali’s ‘The Echo of the Void’ hovering in your line of vision.
You could, and you will.
For now, all that matters is knowing (asking!) where you read from.
And as for the title we eventually chose – where is the mouth of that word?
Wherever there is one – fearless enough to speak it.– Sampurna Chattarji