Author | |
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Imprint | |
Publication Year | 2018 |
Language | English |
Edition | 1st |
Binding | Paperback |
Pages | 46 |
Sky without Sky
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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
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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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Says Tuka-Selected poems of Tukaram
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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.
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Shesha
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Flesh Tint Like a painting by Velazquez A woman stands Alone in the frame Touched by the brush of light Blossoming. How did Flesh Tint reflect Naples Yellow In this greenish blue room? What made the sun Suddenly rise on the palette?
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Frazil
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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.
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Collected Poems
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Adman, householder, mystic, public intellectual and ashram devotee, Kersy Katrak (1936-2007) has never quite received his due as a poet. Katrak’s ‘lush, provocative, and very readable’verse has, with its rare but persistent appearance in anthologies of Indian poetry in English, remained in a curious way at once unforgotten and unrecognized. This book aims, at long last,to remedy this state of affairs. It is the very first comprehensive collection of Katrak’s poetic work, most of it long out of print,some of it previously published only in hard-to-find periodicals. Katrak’s poetry resonates powerfully with Wallace Steven’s observation that ‘It is equal to living in a tragic land, To live in a tragic time’. His concerns remain,palpably,our concerns: a search for the everyday alchemy that might translate the visceral potentials of collective life into generative forms of belonging. This problem of the relation between inner energies and outer forms is at the core of Katrak’s work as a poet and a mystic. And it is what binds his esoteric commitments to his career in advertising. The anthropologist William Mazzarella’s critical introduction to the present volume is the first substantive exploration of these connections in Katrak’s life and work.