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About The Book
Six strings on a guitar, Dion D'Souza reminds us, can make music. Cold Renewal, likewise, reminds us that a poet willing to sieve memory for glittering shards of hurt and humour, can make magic.
– Jerry Pinto
Cold Renewal abounds in Proustian ‘madeleine moments’, recalled and mined in a tone that is at once interrogative, mystical and befuddling – oscillating with uncanny rhythms that are both glacial and childlike. To enter D’Souza’s enigmatic world is to journey through a spatio-temporal mélange of collective and personal histories that are chronicled in sharply Lacanian vicissitudes. Yet an intuitive element – water – runs through it all, washing, purifying and transforming.
Diving in and out of realms both visible and invisible, questioning the notions of the sacred and the profane as well as the very act of seeing, D’Souza’s polyvocality situates the reader in multiple landscapes: in slums; in a child’s reverie; in an adolescent’s desires; in the motion and stasis of a moving car; in miniatures; in Hitchcockian tropes and the murky pages of prehistory. One is stunned by the paradoxical revelations of refracting mirrors, showcasing multiple worlds ravaged by chaos, consumerism and decay. And yet the voice emerges with something
resembling hope, a sense of redemption that is won out of the simple but necessary act of celebrating the beauty in everyday minutiae.
This is a compelling and meditative collection that wrestles with grief and faith, with equal parts candour and complaint. It is a compendium of metaphysical journeys rendered through inventive musical remodellings and laced with winking nods to art and cinema. A baffling, challenging and enchanting book.
– Jennifer Robertson, author of Folie à Deux
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