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 Bombay Quartet
About the Book
Jayant Deshpande was born in India in 1952, but lived abroad for many years before returning to India in 1984. He was educated in India, Africa, and then largely in Canada, where he graduated from Western University and the University of Toronto. His interests include music, photography, literature and translation, science, philosophy as well as essay writing. Since 2002 he contributed to the Mumbai-based quarterly New Quest and was later its assistant editor till 2010. He has published his English translations of selected short fiction in Marathi by Dilip Chitre, Bhau Padhye and Baburao Bagul.
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Three Stories – Jibanananda Das
About the Book
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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As Is, Where Is
About the Book
Lost Images (For Ashay) I am backing home where you died. One year later, to find Changes that mask our surrender To the inevitability of life. I remember my Ambulance Ride With my friend whom you called Daddy. It took me a whole year To under -
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…. -
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The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002–2022
About the Book
“Mazer, along with his northeastern companions Nikolayev and Kapovich – of the further norths and further easts – make jubilant singing verse as they step through the western wreckage. This must be remembered, say the only poets who’ll matter, so I must write in the ways of memory.” — Glyn Maxwell, from the Preface
“These poems are like trees that contain and protect and conceal themselves from themselves. Each wears a rough coat over the sap, the heart, the rainwater and scars. In so many ways the bark of a tree is a scroll with its messages written out of and into its experience. Mazer’s poems know they are beautiful the way the wooden rills on a tree are elegant, made of history, of romance and pride.” — Fanny Howe
“Ben Mazer is a true inheritor of John Ashbery’s legacy, specifically the Ashbery of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Like that classic of American poetry, The Ruined Millionaire ironically also suits the contemporary European scene. In translation, Mazer’s new selected poems could just as easily fit on a shelf of the best contemporary Polish or French poetry. Anglophone readers are lucky to have them available to us first.” — John Hennessy
“When Shakespeare meets Ben Mazer at the Mermaid Tavern he will hand Ben this book. ‘Shakespherian’ the Bard will say. ‘And more.’ Another poet at the end of the bar will nod and remark ‘There are No Dry Salvages there.’ Then Will will read ‘Monsieur Barbary Brecht’ to all and they will all be surprised by joy. You will be too when you read these poems: matchless, immortal, and, like all great poetry, unexplainable.” — Joe Green
“‘Start with the rain’: there is a great deal of rain in Ben Mazer’s poetry, often in darkness and whipped by wind. One might speak of a poetic of the torrential, given the irresistible forward sweep of his poems as they move through overlapping territories of memory and history and dream. He advances through the damp corridors of a foundered world, in which the debris (and the vocabulary and the contentions) of centuries has piled up, and the voices of poets and movie actors and a multitude of others re-echo like displaced wraiths. There are constant surprises—cascades of rhyme and apparitions from a history become ghostly, like ‘Caligari, tortured in oblong angles, / beer garden, mental institute, who mangles / memory’—but no matter how allusive or wildly improvisational, no matter how extraordinarily profuse in their range of reference, the lines are never digressive. The past woven into their ‘deep syntax / of auditory visuality’ is a living past: they exist in an urgent present, whether ‘driving thus into the heart of pain’ or momentarily perceiving Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the last reel of Top Hat, ‘looming and large as any of the designs of God.’ Whatever elements become part of this poetry are distilled with sustained intensity into one substance, a music appropriate to ‘that hour / when memory settles / on the evening / darkness its liquid / history of masks.'” — Geoffrey O’Brien“‘In a soup you never know / what you’ll run into next. All the ingredients repeat, / but you encounter some of them for the first time.’ This is the savory gumbo out of which Ben Mazer has made his poems. At times maddeningly elliptical, at times this ‘ellipticality’ is what moves or tickles or interests you most. The editor of Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, and John Crowe Ransom (among others) is himself a poet very much worth savoring.” — Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems.
“What we can’t think to say, what we don’t know how to say, whether of experience cosmic or minute, he says. The white picket fence that is always intense, the little house between the two big ones, what a movie is. His comparisons are wildly accurate but they aren’t really comparisons at all. They come from similar and related as easily as far away and disparate places or thoughts, which is remarkable for its multidimensionality of seeing. His metaphors are never arbitrary or half convincing, but come from the unconscious. And the sounds fit the sense—there are lines to rival Yeats. And he can sustain a long poem without lagging. Only one who feels every nuance, who suffers intense emotions could write such great poems.” — Ruth Lepson
“The year’s most essential book of poetry.” — Michael Londra in SpoKe
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Where Is the Mouth of That Word?
About the Book
I breathed. I looked up. I saw her standing in the line of fire, “simply standing/on the last line of
this page”, asking, as she looked me in the eye, “Where are you reading from?”And that, dear readers, who are about to encounter Maryam’s poems for the first time, is the
question.
You can Google her, you can hear her speak 1 , you can explore her intersecting engagements as an essayist, translator, and academic.
But first, you can find her here, as I did, in a selection of her poems – from early to later, from the spoken word to the “vocal infection of the page”, from rant to reflection, plea to command.
You could, in obeyance, “Turn the page, and leave!”
You could be sentenced
to an expired word:
(Silence)You could hear the tanin (echo) of Sepehri’s hich (nothingness) reverberating at the same frequency with which you see Dali’s ‘The Echo of the Void’ hovering in your line of vision.
You could, and you will.
For now, all that matters is knowing (asking!) where you read from.
And as for the title we eventually chose – where is the mouth of that word?
Wherever there is one – fearless enough to speak it.– Sampurna Chattarji
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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!