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 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”.
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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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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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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
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अभिधा सुरू असताना ग्लोबलायझेशझेनची प्रक्रिया सुरू झाली होती. आमच्या काही कविता आणि याच दरम्यान स्वतःला आलेलं जगण्याचं नवं भान, ग्लोबलायझेशझेनमुळेमुळे बदललेला भोवताल आणि या सर्वांमुळे उमजलेले लिहिण्याचंही नवीन भान ह्या ‘अभिधा’मधून आम्ही दिलेल्या किंवा आम्ही मिळविलेल्या काही गोष्टी.
१९९९ मध्ये अभिधा नंतर सुरू केलं तेव्हा ग्लोबलायझेशझेनचा परिणाम असलेले साहित्य आम्ही प्रसिद्ध करू असे धोरण होते आणि २०१४ साली अभिधानंतर बंद करेपर्यंत आम्ही ते लावून धरले. ग्लोबलायझेशनंतर जीवनाप्रमाणे साहित्यही बदलत होतं. हा बदल पकडण्याचा, डॉक्युमेण्ट करण्याचा, नवीन साहित्य लोकांपर्यंत पोहोचविण्याचा उद्देश होता. हा अवकाश ग्लोबलायझेशन’नंतर’चा आणि एका अर्थाने ‘अभिधा”नंतरचा’ अवकाश होता. या पुस्तकातून अभिधानंतरमध्ये प्रकाशित झालेल्या निवडक कविता, लेख, मुलाखती आणि संपादकीय देत आहोत. या सर्व लिखाणां मधून ग्लोबलायझेशन आणि डिजिटालायझेशनंतर निरंतर बदलत असलेली भाषा, संस्कृती,आणि जगणं अधोरेखित होतं. मराठीत सध्या लिहिणाऱ्या, वाचणाऱ्या, विचार करणाऱ्या, भाषेची आणि संस्कृतीची चिंता करणाऱ्या आणि भाषेसाठी झगडणाऱ्या लोकांसाठी हे पुस्तक खूप महत्त्वाचा दस्तऐवज ठरू शकेल याची खात्री आहे.
Feeling happy to see great documentation of our work in Marathi from the late nineteen nineties. Abhidhanantar was a major movement in Marathi that self-consciously highlighted the transformation of our society and culture due to the processes of the post-1989 phase of hyper globalisation that has created the world as we understand today. Our generation was at
the cusp of the dying old analogue world that the modernist and identitarian generation of the Cold War period we had inherited, and the emergent new world of digital natives we gave birth to. Our poetry, world view and thinking documents this shift and this was the periodical that provided the platform to express this discourse. It brought together and created not only new voices like Sanjeev Khandekar, Saleel Wagh, Shridhar Tilwe, Hemant Divate, Manya Joshi, Nitin Kulkarni, Mangesh Narayanrao Kale, Arun Kale, Varjesh Solanki and Nitin Rindhe among many
others but also created a new readership in Marathi.– Sachin Ketkar
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The Magic Hand of Chance
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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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As happens on all trips, in the pages of this book we find unforeseen questions and unexpected landscapes. These verses are transparent because they speak to us not about what is intuited or remembered but what is seen while trying to establish order, specify limits, and vanquish shadows.
