Author | |
---|---|
Imprint | |
Language | |
Edition | |
Publishing Year | |
Binding |
The Tattooed Teetotaller and other wonders
$18
About the Book
We say mind the book, it’s out of control.
But it’s author says
‘Nonsense verse helps its writers escape their resident demons,
setting them free to deal with the more transient ones of mischief.
At time I’ve tried to use that freedom to highlight contemporary absurdities,
at other times to write about those of a not-too-distant colonial past.
Readers will find that not everything here is nonsense, like the poem below.
But I hope they also find that however disastrous our falls into folly may be,
they can also be luminous’
Like Dictators
Rats are strict in their regulations.
Like dictators they regulate
meals and nations
along lines of bite.
Related products
-
Frazil
About the Book
Menka Shivdasani’s poetry is both original and strikingly unusual, not just her tangential way of putting things across, but also how thought process and imagination run away with the poem, and make it exciting. An experience is translated into another experience and then gets mixed with fancy in a juice blender. Chopping lettuce, she’ll be assailed by visions—burning bride, politician, a ‘wounded Hiroshima’, and finally a finger-chopping Nazi. A poem about separation will end with her handling ‘alien porcelain’ at a tea party. For over three decades the excitement she brings to her fine poetry has never deserted her.
-
Walk Like Monsters
About the Book
These are late night poems of the body that sing also of catastrophe, how wide it is, how easy, like ‘being in one place instead of another.’ Anindita Sengupta’s new book is hot, harrowing and masterful. It will stay with me for a long time. ~ Jeet Thayil Anindita Sengupta is a poet of the precise line, the measured image, of mediated passion, the sure ending. Her observation is acute, her politics seldom theatrical and her passage from one world to another and from the object to the spirit smooth and subtle. Her poetry proves that silk can wound and knife can flower. ~ K. Satchidanandan “They rise in this landscape, the ancients – old loves, myths, cities, secret revolutions. Anindita Sengupta’s language is forever old and forever new. Fretful, explosive, terrifying. Her poetry will leave you with beautiful scars.” ~ Janice Pariat
-
Banaras And The Other
About the Book
Ashwani Kumar’s poems in ‘Banaras and The Other” are a mischievous irreverence turned at times to the present and at times to the past. The personal and the political, memories and nostalgia, mythical characters and contemporary parodies mix and mingle in these poems in diverse proportions to produce a rare poetic energy that belongs entirely to our times of pain and paradox. –K. Satchidanandan
Ashwani Kumar’s Banaras and the Other captivates us as a delightful romp through myth, folklore and history. Read past the revelry, however, and you will see that it engages passionately and provocatively with the fissured, schismatic scenarios of 21st century India.–Ranjit Hoskote
-
Grab your heart & follow me
About the Book
“In my wonderland, there are only beginnings, ‘there is no end’. Plunge into this book of?poems by Claus Ankersen where cat-gods rule, babies are born with stargates for eyes, kisses are catalogued and the 12th pen writes of celebratory sins. Expand the eternity of now. Be nomad, tiger, ‘soulhuntress.’ Head-dive into the mysteries of the world. Dance
-
Light, the Temptation
About the Book
In Zingonia’s new poems it is a similar exercise that is happening. Instead of justifying the ways of God to men, these poems seem to me to be the ways of men and women to God. This daring act of a moment of surrender to the pristine unity of every thing cements the diverse poems here into one epic of mutations and metamorphoses. In this world the persona an Algerian beggar can merge into one of Jesus. Atoms and stars partake of the same reality as a flower. The fractured fates of Shen Fu, Maurice Utrillo and Max Jacob, which are acts of recurrent human tragedy become settings of Divine Comedy. Though the thrust of Zingonia’s poems is indubitably mystical, their mysticism goes beyond orthodoxies and heterodoxies of what is generally considered mystical. Their laconic beauty has the palpability of something militantly this- worldly as if Eternity is indissolubly in love with creations of time. At this point my words want to go back to the eloquent silence of these poems. I am sure other readers of this remarkable work will find these poems as enchanting and enlightening as I did. ‘Light, the Temptation’ is not a work to be read and abandoned. It invites us to contemplate on the rich resonances of its deceptively simple expressions in order to return the world to the world, ourselves to ourselves, meanings to our world where faceless robots are marching blindly towards irredeemable emptiness. – H S Shivaprakash (an excerpt from his introductory note)
-
Scripted in the Streams
About the Books
There is an intense humanity in these poems by Rati Saxena, a humanity that ennobles all of us who are humble enough to listen. There is an empathy is these poems for all living things – for the spider, for the ant, for the owl – and a similar understanding of all things that may not be alive. -Alan Titley, Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish, University College, Cork It has travelled a long, long way this voice?and we welcome it as we would do a stranger, into the West where despair, decline and decay are seemingly permanent lodgers, Saxena’s lyrics arrive like a fresh breeze. New-born, fresh and smelling of the earth, her poems draw on the well of Indo-European tradition, the intimate links that bind the female psyche and the landscape in all its fecundity. -Dr Michel h’Aodha, University of Limerick Saxena allows for different aeons to melt into each other. She creates a world in which humans interact with insects and animals. We are all of and from the same source. The image of the snake is a powerful one to explain the frustrations of modern women in today’s India. Her vision makes a mockery of the boundaries around our lives and we sail with her through a magical world, coming into contact with the source of life itself. There are echoes of Flann O’ Brien in the delightful poem about the bicycle of her youth. Taboos and rituals will not enslave her and poetry finds its way into the washing on the line and the fire that bakes our daily bread. – Ceaiti Ni Bheildiuin, poet In this selection of the poems of Rati Saxena we are drawn into a world of imagery where deep respect is shown for the low -Brian O Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame, USA
-
Says Tuka-Selected poems of Tukaram
About the Book
Tukaram was born in 1608 and vanished without a trace in 1650. what little we know of his life is a reconstruction from his own autobiographical poems, the contemporary poetess Bahinabai’s memoirs in verse, and the later biographer of Marathi poet-saints, Mahipati’s account. The rest is all folklore, though it cannot be dismissed on those grounds alone. Modern scholars such as the late V. S. Bendre have made arduous efforts to collate evidence from disparate contemporary sources to establish a well-researched biography of Tukaram. But even this is largely conjectural.
Tukaram is therefore not only the last great Bhakti poet in Marathi but he is also the first truly modern Marathi poet in terms of temper and thematic choice, technique and vision. He is certainly the most vital link between medieval and modern Marathi poetry. Tukaram’s stature in Marathi literature is comparable to that of Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. He could be called the quintessential Marathi poet reflecting the genius of the language as well as its characteristic literary culture. There is no other Marathi writer who has so deeply and widely influenced Marathi literary culture since. Tukaram’s poetry has shaped the Marathi language, as it is spoken by 70 million people today and not just the literary language. Perhaps one should compare his influence with that of the King James version of the Bible upon speakers of the English language. For Tukaram’s poetry is also used by illiterate millions to voice their prayers or to express their love of God.