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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ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS
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The fascinating aspect of Zingonia’s poem is the paradoxical unity of the two qualitatively different domains of the earthly and the spiritual. The two are interfluent. Though the culmination of the poem is in the divine love, I prefer not to read the poem in a linear way like in linear spiritual narratives such as Pilgrim’s Progress or Divina Comedia. Here, as in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, past and future always move to the end – what is always present – and the end is in the beginning. It is pointless to trace the narrative or paraphrase Zingonia’s On the Brink of Abyss – a series of epiphanic moments of poetry at its intensest. The only justice a reader and critic can do to this wonder of a poem is to resonate with those ineffable epiphanies that have somehow slipped into language. What more can I do except to share with readers the way I
resonate with those precious moments of epiphanic agony and ecstasy. And congratulate Zingonia on this rare achievement which has no parallel in any poetry I know of.
– H.S. Shivaprakash
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Folie Á Deux
$18About the Book
Jennifer Robertson’s first book of poems, Folie à Deux, introduces us to an assured and sophisticated new voice in the world of Anglophone poetry in India. Robertson celebrates the sensuousness, the warm flesh of language. Her poems sharpen our awareness of things viscerally experienced, our memories of things held and cherished, our desire to secure forever the ephemeral yet compelling images of photography and cinema. In her handling, the resonance of the breath crafted into sound takes concrete occupancy of its environment, becomes a percussive force; she writes: “I wonder about sound invading space, wounding, astounding space and stories rising like a Phoenix.”
Here is a poet who captivates us, enchants us into spaces that “have two doors and no exit”.
– Ranjit Hoskote, author of Jonahwhale
Jennifer Robertson’s poems invite us to a world of “intimate strangeness” where poetry is “nuts and waywardness” and poets are “hoodlums” who leave behind “delinquencies” as their legacy. Although thickly silted with references to literature, painting and cinema, this is not a world of glibness or slick cultural sophistication. A throbbing vein of disquiet runs through Folie à Deux reminding us of relationships that could lean towards “darkness and magic”; lives lived in “intermission” with fragments spilling over “in the dark, under the seat”; and a self that yearns to drown into “a sunken civilisation”. This is a poetry of crafted surfaces and unexpected trenches, beeping microwaves and buried cities – allusive and “alluvial” all at once. Folie à Deux is a strong, self-assured début.
– Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Wild Women
Lexically restless, geodesic, and unapologetically omnivorous, Jennifer Robertson’s Folie à Deux is a dialectic that considers the fulcra of observance and animacy, liberation and stagnancy, tranquility and obsession. Robertson’s poetry applies a painterly heat to our bodies, and readers to scratch at persona, and to map a self through the historical detritus of art and signs. What disturbs me most about this book is that, ravenously, Robertson “reinvents time travel”.
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Salt & Pepper
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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
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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
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Girija Sharma: Silence emerges in these poems as a powerful metaphor in the interplay of
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–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
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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,
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Shyista Khan: the poems reflect an unmediated subjectivity… The
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Stray Poems
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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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Midnight Verbs
$18About the Book
“What used to be borders is now you,” writes Marko Pogačar in this beautiful, inimitable
collection of poems, giving us a world of post-war Yugoslavia where “TV shows start with
familiar scenes.” What is the poet to do in this world? The poet demands the “green skull of
an apple.” It is a world where eggs chirp, newspapers rustle, and the dead are near. What is it,
this syntax of seeing one's country with full honesty, without any lyric filters? How does it
become so dazzlingly lyrical, nevertheless? “I dislike walking on a person's left side,” the
poet admits. “I shove the night into an evil e-mail / and send it to the entire nation.” And
behind him we see the world, “beautiful, like a burning guillotine.” It is blessed, this
strangeness of abandon, after all is lost. And yet, not all is lost. What is happening here? Real
poetry is happening. Lyric fire. I know it when instead of writing a comment on the book, I
just want to keep quoting. For poetry is a mystery that is communicated before it is
understood. Marko Pogačar is the real thing, and I am especially grateful to Andrea Jurjević
for these crisp, beautiful translations.
—Ilya Kaminsky
History is a constant and defining character in poetry where the most memorable lines
brilliantly combine dark, dry humor with a direct treatment of the physical. There we
discover a mad desire for laughter. For reckoning with rules. With borders. With God. Marko
Pogačar is a poet of expressive power and specificity. Almost every poem is intense and
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—Claudiu Komartin
Pogačar's poetry is original, layered, equivocal, and rich in references. Like Brodsky, Pogačar
turns to history, but his associations are more reminiscent of John Ashbery and the delightful
strangeness of Tomaž Šalamun.
—Martín López-VegaMarko Pogačar crafts rich, lush poems in a more consistent and refreshing manner than other
poets. His poetry is filled with images that are tough to visualize. His use of language is
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All that I Wanna Do (English)
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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
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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
