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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The Magic Hand of Chance
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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Stray Poems
About the Book
Abhay K. strikes such a cheerful, sensual and sunny note in so many of his individual poems…with a pure, ringing sound and rhythm all of his own.
—Gabriel Rosenstock, Poet, Ireland
Abhay K. is a trusted guide to modern poetry, to the journey in which we are seeking truth, peace and justice…feel the spirit of God coursing through his lines.
—Indran Amirthanayagam, Poet, USA
About the Book
Stray Poems takes you on a poetic ride across the world, to the moon and planets in our Solar System and to the far reaches of the Universe and then back to our glorious Earth! Bon Voyage!
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Three Stories – Jibanananda Das
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Reading Jibanananda Das’s stories is like entering straight into the middle-class Bengali mind with its desire, ambition, morbidity and despair. Through the narratives around three men whose melancholy defines the structure of these three stories, the writer re-examines the concepts of success and failure, desire and fulfillment, love and weariness, ennui and death. While the insights are those of a poet, these stories marked by Jibanananda’s deep involvement with Bengali landscape, cuisine and culture, transcend his lyrical impulse to become proper, if technically innovative, short stories with the touch of a master of the genre. Chandak Chattarji’s English versions have been able to capture the provincial setting and style of the original narratives keeping intact their nuanced psychological implications and larger insights into the human condition.’ – K. Satchidanandan ‘It has been a privilege to discover Das the writer of fiction through Chandak Chattarji’s elegant and sensitive translation of three of the master’s short stories, ‘Chhaya Nat’ (‘Shadow Play’), ‘Gram o Shohorer Galpo’ (‘Tale of City and Village’), and ‘Bilash’ (which retains its original title here).’ – Ranjit Hoskote
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Obsessed with Life
About the Book
“Mozetič’s verse conjures a distinctly gay way of looking at the world. It is both placid and paranoid, opening the world into paper-thin layers of sex, loneness and non-disingenuous self-reflection. His lyric has a remarkable flow, his language is persuasively simple, and his tone is forthright, all of which give the shattered heart at the core of this book a strange magnetic force.”
– Akhil Katyal, poet, translator, scholar and queer activist
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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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Salt & Pepper
About the Book
Salt and Pepper, Sukrita’s selected poems, present an eloquent, word-induced
silence articulated with remarkable ease. In the centre of the
multisensory, reflective silence dwells memory that pesters and heals, and
shapes a deeper understanding of self and existence, taking one beyond the
mere unmasking of a past. What adds luminosity to Sukrita’s densely textured
poems is the layered and fluid exploration of life experience, without any sense
of closure or finality. — Shafey Kidwai—-
Words are not just words, there is a long journey of emotion, thought and
experience behind them with which Sukrita weaves the weft and the warp of her
poems in shades of Salt and Pepper.— Nirupama Dutt
Girija Sharma: Silence emerges in these poems as a powerful metaphor in the interplay of
images which are impressionistic, symbolic and existential all at once. All noise is cancelled
–what remain are words in the purest form building a symphony of silence.
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Madhavi Apte: Sukrita’s poems are on the one hand illusive and on the other potent like her
own modern, abstract paintings. Most poems combine the elements of a mystique, the erotic
and the emotional, personal and impersonal. The poems are grounded and yet ethereal.
Basudhara Roy : Many-layered, teasing in its apparent simplicity, and haunting in its
profundity…Animated by her painter’s consciousness, Sukrita’s images are terse, pictorial
and at the same time, both concrete and abstract.
The compression, precision, lightness and luminosity of these poems is undeniable. There is,
in them, a simplicity, intensity and finesse that characterizes classical Eastern forms like the
haiku and the tanka.—–
Shyista Khan: the poems reflect an unmediated subjectivity… The
poetic consciousness borders between self-effacement and self
assertion….