Author | Anand Thakore |
---|---|
Imprint | Poetrywala |
Publication Year | 2017 |
Language | English |
Edition | 1 |
Binding | Paperback |
Pages | 78 |
Seven Deaths & Four Scrolls
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About the Book
Nabanita Kanungo’s collection is simultaneously an elegy and a victory song. A documentation of the heartbreaks that have plagued our subcontinent for the past century or so, her poems re-define the lyric form, chronicling the unfolding of a personal self framed by larger political events. Here, history appears as a long, continuous saga of violence, in which Partition memories remain juxtaposed within the everyday lived realities and violences of neoliberal Indian cities. With this collection, Kanungo provides a ghostly account of quotidian survival?stories that remain forever out of official histories?and re-defines the meaning of Anglophone India political poetry of contemporary times.Nabanita Kanungo’s poems ache with an awareness of how poetry cannot truly evoke anything but absence, of how ‘It rains and words say nothing’; ‘Only memory is green’. In this tragedy, Kanungo finds the only solace available to the poet: a luminous quality in the every day, the ‘Mirror where things are simply written with light’. These poems work in the liminal spaces of the world and of the self, between the present moment and its turning into memory, between words and rain.
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Learn from the Almond Leaf
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In these her late poems, the volcano that is Eunice de Souza is still erupting. As in her early work too, what she here ‘upchucks’ is lava, molten lines that burn and glow and leave a permanent mark. The tone, as before, is casual, bantering, close to the spoken idiom that is uniquely hers. When terrible things happen the tone changes, quickens, then relaxes again. Life is bemusing, ludicrous; death even more so. In the work of no other poet I can think of do you find such brevity and grandeur, swiftness of utterance and the unbearable weight of grief, unbearable because de Souza is so dry-eyed. ‘The crone’s still capable/of spite’ she writes in one poem, the old necklace-of-skulls self-irony intact, except that in her case ‘spite’ also means ‘wisdom’. It is easy to forget that the crone is deeply moral as well, and like any moral being she too feels that she’s lived ‘In the wrong season.’ There is plenty in these spare but unsparing poems to remind us of the classical virtues we associate with Bhartrhari, for instance, or a Latin epigrammatist like Martial. These are poems to live by. In time, they will come to be seen as classics of our literature, as many of her earlier poems already are. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
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40 under 40
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“The Indian poetry scene has always been considered to be lively, but no better evidence of this fact exists than 40/40. Here we have forty contemporary Indian poets under forty years old, and what we encounter is extraordinarily timely and compelling, providing us the trace of a newly emergent lyric consciousness, simultaneously local and cosmopolitan. Here we have Akhil Katyal reminiscing about being ten years old and growing up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, “battling the stars of a virus”; we have Chandramohan S’ witty “Plus-Size Poem” that “does not opt for offshore liposuction”; and we have the speaker of Ishita Basu Mallik’s sonnenizio about going commando under her jeans and turning her beloved into ” an electric remnant bombarding” her “bones with wavelengths.” From Jennifer Robertson’s prose poem about Jesus and Jaipur, Rohan Chhetri’s universe in braille, or Shelly Bhoil’s typographical experimentation, this anthology shows us the pulse of a generation coming of age in an era of mass media and Hindu mythology. I have no doubt that this will be one of those books that when looked back on will have been proven to be seminal and indispensable, introducing us to both the present and the future of Indian poetry.” -Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize winning poet and Founding Editor of Drunken Boat * THIS ANTHOLOGY HAS BEEN EDITED BY NABINA DAS & SEMEEN ALI
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The Metaphysics of the Tree-Frog’s Silence
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It is our loss that we did not know Ajithan Kurup’s work when he was alive, and we did not celebrate his brave and lonely project: to render the unsayable into language. He cannot be imitated or replaced, only admired.- Jeet Thayil
To enter Ajithan G. Kurup’s poetic world is to risk, in the words of his title poem, dancing “headlong down precipices.” It’s rare to find a contemporary poet who dares near-unattainable heights and fearful depths on dancing words – words that may sometimes seem far-fetched or invented but which, in fact, are inspired variants or archaic forms of those more usually used: “sempstress” instead of “seamstress”, “enow” instead of “enough”, “trode” instead of “trod”.-ADIL JUSSAWALLA