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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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.
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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.
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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.
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About the Book
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“What used to be borders is now you,” writes Marko Pogačar in this beautiful, inimitable
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—Ilya Kaminsky
History is a constant and defining character in poetry where the most memorable lines
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