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About the Book
We promise the new year – hope – and we will fill the pitcher.
We will drink sunsets of magic and we will park despair on the way.
We will leave sadness stranded by the light post, solar panelled for tomorrow.
And today will still be beautiful.
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In Amlanjyoti Goswami’s third poetry collection, A Different Story, the reader is the ‘owner of the universe’ and ‘all things bright and beautiful’. Mirroring slices of a life spent immersed in the rare solace one finds only in the arts, the poems are contemplative and bathed in the light of strange nostalgia. Ghosts wander these stanzas looking for cups of chai and simple comfort, as do crows, tired elephants and even the beloved dead.
Here, a bonesetter can right the universe if the angle agrees. A lawyer persona asks Krishna and Arjuna questions on the ethics of war and the price of human life. Karna and Kunti reflect on the quirks of destiny. But like all good poets who don’t take themselves too seriously, Amlan sprinkles levity and wit in good measure: an elusive cigarette escapes Fellini; Basho wakes up to cold tea; odes aplenty are put aside for kebabs, cucumbers, pithas and other important loves at ‘first bite’.
The words honour the space around them and when read aloud, they ring with a unique music that travels from the poet’s very own Guwahati and Dilli to faraway New York and even Banalata Sen’s Natore, resting along the way inside a Vinod Kumar Shukla poem. There are many books inside this one. Let the poems guide and glide you over traffic and terrible heat, over monuments and flowing rivers, through the many worlds they inhabit, ‘like a bird resting mid-flight’.
– Sohini Basak
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