Author | |
---|---|
Imprint | |
Language | |
Edition | |
Publication Year | 2018 |
Binding | |
Pages | 177 |
Collected Poems
$16
About the Book
” … a poet who has been a quietly enduring presence in the country’s literary scene for five decades … ” “It was my first realization that a gaze unclouded by sentiment could evoke something truer than sympathy. That an unspoken poignancy could lie in the act of not averting one’s gaze. That poetry could lie in a simple unblinking intensity of attention.”
Related products
-
Mutatis Mutandis
About the Book
Through sex-dolls and addictions, for whom poetry can be just another narcotic throbbing in your vein. Khandekar’s man has stretched himself to the limits of the Machiavellian primate, modifying his behaviour and absurdum to fit in with the changing patterns of a world spinning out of control on the wheel of progress. Meet the ghost in the machine Sanjeev Khandekar’s poetry grins impishly, then socks you in the eye. It makes you feel horns on your head and inspect your skin for green stripes. Khandekar breaks conventions of belief, language and genre to offer a world with no certainties, where you are just a gob of self-awareness floating in a matrix of virtual reality, mutating every moment to balance your inner needs with social expectations. You are the Mutatis Mutandis Man the human ‘with necessary changes’ carried out the modified man tossed between inscrutable science and enigmatic religious faith, the creature who gropes for love and creativity that may lure you towards self-destruction. Meet Khandekar’s Monster and see if he seems familiar.
Khandekar’s poetry, like his art, is disturbingly unconventional; and Abhay Sardesai and Nandita Wagle’s excellent translation from Marathi now brings it to the English reader.
-Antara Dev Sen -
Walk Like Monsters
About the Book
These are late night poems of the body that sing also of catastrophe, how wide it is, how easy, like ‘being in one place instead of another.’ Anindita Sengupta’s new book is hot, harrowing and masterful. It will stay with me for a long time. ~ Jeet Thayil Anindita Sengupta is a poet of the precise line, the measured image, of mediated passion, the sure ending. Her observation is acute, her politics seldom theatrical and her passage from one world to another and from the object to the spirit smooth and subtle. Her poetry proves that silk can wound and knife can flower. ~ K. Satchidanandan “They rise in this landscape, the ancients – old loves, myths, cities, secret revolutions. Anindita Sengupta’s language is forever old and forever new. Fretful, explosive, terrifying. Her poetry will leave you with beautiful scars.” ~ Janice Pariat
-
Frazil
About the Book
Menka Shivdasani’s poetry is both original and strikingly unusual, not just her tangential way of putting things across, but also how thought process and imagination run away with the poem, and make it exciting. An experience is translated into another experience and then gets mixed with fancy in a juice blender. Chopping lettuce, she’ll be assailed by visions—burning bride, politician, a ‘wounded Hiroshima’, and finally a finger-chopping Nazi. A poem about separation will end with her handling ‘alien porcelain’ at a tea party. For over three decades the excitement she brings to her fine poetry has never deserted her.
-
Banaras And The Other
About the Book
Ashwani Kumar’s poems in ‘Banaras and The Other” are a mischievous irreverence turned at times to the present and at times to the past. The personal and the political, memories and nostalgia, mythical characters and contemporary parodies mix and mingle in these poems in diverse proportions to produce a rare poetic energy that belongs entirely to our times of pain and paradox. –K. Satchidanandan
Ashwani Kumar’s Banaras and the Other captivates us as a delightful romp through myth, folklore and history. Read past the revelry, however, and you will see that it engages passionately and provocatively with the fissured, schismatic scenarios of 21st century India.–Ranjit Hoskote
-
The Owl and the Laughing Buddha
About the Book
The poems in The Owl and the Laughing Buddha bring a ‘lighthouse sweep of attentiveness’ to their subjects. This is a book about noting, from the title poem’s companionable but contrasting figures on a writing desk to the devastating aftermath of a cloudburst in the mountains, and from a flier’s eye-view to a walker’s – and a mole’s. Here are poems interested in gods and figures of myth, and in observing houses, trees, birds and other creatures in a changing neighbourhood; poems that talk shop with fellow poets and respond to works of art and culture; and poems that watch our responses to the daily catastrophes that sometimes constitute ‘news’ – whose interest is no less a matter of whimsy, perhaps, than some of the tales narrated in the final section of the book. Yet the poems rest on an implicit conviction that everything must be given its due and treated seriously – though not solemnly, for it is mirth, after all, that is the laughing Buddha’s centre of gravity. Treading margins between the real and the imagined, the concerned and the tongue-in-cheek, this is Menon’s third collection of poems.
-
Says Tuka-Selected poems of Tukaram
About the Book
Tukaram was born in 1608 and vanished without a trace in 1650. what little we know of his life is a reconstruction from his own autobiographical poems, the contemporary poetess Bahinabai’s memoirs in verse, and the later biographer of Marathi poet-saints, Mahipati’s account. The rest is all folklore, though it cannot be dismissed on those grounds alone. Modern scholars such as the late V. S. Bendre have made arduous efforts to collate evidence from disparate contemporary sources to establish a well-researched biography of Tukaram. But even this is largely conjectural.
Tukaram is therefore not only the last great Bhakti poet in Marathi but he is also the first truly modern Marathi poet in terms of temper and thematic choice, technique and vision. He is certainly the most vital link between medieval and modern Marathi poetry. Tukaram’s stature in Marathi literature is comparable to that of Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. He could be called the quintessential Marathi poet reflecting the genius of the language as well as its characteristic literary culture. There is no other Marathi writer who has so deeply and widely influenced Marathi literary culture since. Tukaram’s poetry has shaped the Marathi language, as it is spoken by 70 million people today and not just the literary language. Perhaps one should compare his influence with that of the King James version of the Bible upon speakers of the English language. For Tukaram’s poetry is also used by illiterate millions to voice their prayers or to express their love of God.