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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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”.
– Jhani Randhawa, author of Time Regime
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Salt & Pepper
$20About 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.
—-
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…. -
The Magic Hand of Chance
$24ABOUT 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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ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS
$16About the Book
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
Poet, playwright, literary scholar and translator -
The Compass Bird
$15About the Book
Observant and meditative, lit with gentle whimsy, Siddhartha Menon’s work on the animal world leads us from ornithology to ontology, detail to dazzling insight, in a wingbeat. Here is a book in which the reverie of snails, the ‘mynahness’ of mynahs, the unhurried gaze of nilgai, becomes a way to reflect on all the eternal questions—time, belonging, love, purpose, a world ‘stained with stillness’, in which ‘those who attend have the last word’. One of the most delightful new books of poetry I have read this year.
– Arundhathi Subramaniam
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Nivdak AbhidhaNantar
$50About the Book
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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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
scandalous, dejected and intelligent, or a poetic whirlwind of all of the above that’s not to be
messed with.
—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
rarely referential; it's more in the service of creating linguistic realities, those that exist only in words. Pogačar seems to be constantly testing the ability of language to create worlds.
— Irena Matijašević
