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CALLING OVER WATER
$16About the Book
Praise for Priya’s Poetry:
Written over a decade, Calling Over Water features poems in three movements. The first trails a wake of lacunae and dislocation but also remembrance and gratitude for departed loved ones. Next, the tempo shifts as the mind sifts through dazzlement, disappointments, riddles and resolutions. Poetry making and identity are explored and mapped. In the last movement, geographies of space and time are located through art, history and the act of journeying. The self is in part reconstituted and returned as a retuned being. “Are you recyclable?” “Why does art leap out of the window when there’s no terrorist attack, only collapse?” “What if you stop smelling of loathing?” These are some of the brave and probing questions Priya Sarukkai Chabria poses in Calling Over Water.
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Shorelines
$14About the Book
In his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, W.B.Yeats sees himself transformed into a golden bird after his death. The bird is meant to entertain the city’s lords and ladies by singing of ‘what’s past, or passing, or to come.’ In the real and imaginary Byzantiums we inhabit today, Adil Jussawalla’s poems have a similar purpose – to tell, foretell, and uncover the ravaged face of the present.
‘He’s there on that street, making sounds that belong
to lands nobody knows, not in this world,
past sailing, past understanding.’
– from Jussawalla’s poem ‘Navigation Marks’
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
– Jerry Pinto
These lines by Jussawalla—with their images of the maritime, the mortal, and the beyond— drop anchors that stun as they fall through hulls and remembrance. There is a sense of being at once behind the helm of The Flying Dutchman, and trying to find sea-legs.
This homage to a city, where tarpaulin allies with sky and weather, is rich in puns
(“Faults not our own”-The Earthquake) and absurdity (“This number does not exist./ This port does not exist./ They should have told you.”).
Shorelines is a treasure as immeasurable as its shipwrecks’.
–Arjun Rajendran -
Supremo 16/70
$2About the Book
Miguel-Manso has published 11 books of poetry since his debut,
Contra a manhã burra(2008). His critically acclaimed collections include Santo subito (2010), Ensinar o caminho ao diabo (2012), Tojo: Poemas escolhidos (2013), Persianas (2015) and Mortel (2018). He has collaborated with several theatre companies and directors, and has been invited as a participating speaker to literary festivals, lectures and poetry readings, in and outside of Portugal. He has written, produced and directed (in collaboration with João Manso) the feature film Bibliography (2013) – a journey on a raft down two Portuguese rivers and through five hundred years of literature. -
Modern Guilt
$2About the Book
A sense of evening pervades Christos Koukis’ Modern Guilt, translated into English by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Elle Arscott. This twilight is historical, ridden by the background of the financial crisis in Greece, as much as poetic, where ‘we are rich in such a way that no bank condescends to accept us’. But like all things Greek, there is the sun, which peeks at odd places and throws light on hidden corners. In Koukis’ world, the sun glints, before setting at nine o’clock behind the Acropolis, even if ‘deep down, the light makes things difficult’.
It is in this sense that Modern Guilt holds a mirror to us, our anxieties and vanities. The earthquakes in Modern Guilt are political. History is ugly and ‘the country does not go to sleep with clear conscience’. Continuing in the tradition of the modern Greek masters, Koukis has use for antiquity, but this antiquity is not removed from history, its pain and betrayal. It provides no respite, only hard lessons. The financial earthquake of Greece is but one more link in that story.
Yet in its moments of crises, hope shines through —‘there is a feeling of life that never abandons us, an honest victory’. There is redemption in love and in the hope of love. Amidst the shadows, for Koukis it ultimately ‘doesn’t matter’, for even ‘Dresden was rebuilt and now it shines’.
-Amlanjyoti Goswami
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Like Earth to Stars
$20About the Book
When Shivaprakash (b.1954) entered the arena of Kannada poetry in the ’70s, Kannada modernism had already exhausted its possibilities. Those disenchanted with the modernist introversion spearheaded a new trend called Dalit-Bandaya movement. Critical of both modernist self-consciousness as well as the loud politics of rebel writers, Shivaprakash forged his own poetic idiom, at once sensuous and spiritual, political and philosophical, inspired by the regional folk and Bhakti traditions of poetry. He moved away from the monologic and didactic modes of contemporary Kannada poetry to pioneer a new dialogic-mode in which personal and social concerns enter into debate with a multiplicity of Indian cultural traditions. His more recent poems of the last couple of decades written in different parts of the world have broadened the essentially dialogic nature of his poetry, engaging in wide-ranging debates with other cultures and civilisations without sacrificing his rootedness in his own Kannada-specificity. Currently Professor of Theatre Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Shivaprakash is also an eminent playwright and translator. He has held several important administrative positions in the past including Editor, Indian Literature, and Director, Nehru Centre, Berlin. His works have been translated into various Indian and foreign languages including Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Lithuanian, German and Arabic and won him many prestigious awards in India including the Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi awards. He is Honorary Fellow, School of Letters at the University of Iowa, USA. Shivaprakash’s major interests include yoga, tantra and other Indian spiritual traditions as reflected in two English books, Everyday Yogi and Guru: Ten Doors to Ancient Wisdom.
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Equator
$12About the Book
Reading Adriana Lisboa’s poems one becomes aware that in the clear light of their precise articulations something secret is taking place. That “something / taking place in secret” can be as anguished as the poems are calm; as wild as the poems are poised. She dares ask any question and – even more courageously – dares answer (or accept that there is none). Poems that are tethered to terra firma can cut loose without warning; knowing can ambush you from anywhere. There are no dirty tricks in her work, no showy gestures. Instead, there is the animating intelligence of life lived acutely, on and through words, this impossible sustenance that poets seek, and only rarely – as in Lisboa’s case – find. In her able translator Alison Entrekin’s hands, Adriana Lisboa’s poetry offers an exhilarating oxygen, “freeing in the word / what the word seals in”.
Sampurna Chattarji, poetry editor of The Indian Quarterly
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The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans
$16About the Books
In a world of loss and absences, K. Srilata’s concerns go beyond the personal into larger issues of disappearing languages and people in conflict-ridden zones. Her sensitive eye for detail, the unexpected images and her use of language that can be both sharp and delicate, make these poems memorable. – Menka Shivdasani, Indian poet
K Srilata, in writing this important collection, has given voice to all who struggle to find meaning, who wonder endlessly what that other reality might be – the one that lies just beyond our reach, just beyond the picture frame. Her writing invites us to see the unanswered questions as doorways back into our lives. I love Srilata’s book, her light touch, her true poetic-voice, and her ability to catch a poem on the wing and transmit it to her willing and excited reader. – Murray, Poet and editor of Poethead
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River Wedding
$16About the Book
The hundred pages of this collection give scope enough to show the generosity of Amlanjyoti Goswami’s perception of the world. This is both intimate and ambitious, paying attention to the gentle nuances of family life without losing sight of the disturbing ways that history unfolds. Moments of revelatory strangeness are often entered through a child’s viewpoint – ‘sunlight talks to Zenzi…’ – but the effect never sentimental. The whole collection could be dedicated, in the delicate wording of a poem simply titled Lunch: ‘To life, more life. // The kind that,like a child, / takes in a morsel, when nobody’s looking.’ The deeper messages speak quietly, but all the more convincingly for that, and the points of arrival are not grand visions but ‘a fine ordinariness’. What renders this quality fine is Goswami’s sure and economical way with language – ‘we wear the dusk of sorry news’, or the blind flautist’s sensation of ‘the grain in the wood, the press and leave / of my fingers’. There is no postcolonial uncertainty in this marrying of Indian perspectives and the English language, whose literary heritage is graciously acknowledged, with nods to Soyinka and Achebe, to Walcott and even (with a healthily wry smile) to Matthew Arnold when he turns up in a second-hand bookstall in Chandni Chowk. Rather, there is a generous welcome to the world – with the freshness of an outsider’s view sometimes, but always with a sense of hospitality. -Philip Gross
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Coconuts on Mars
$12About the Book
Indran Amirthanayagam has been writing poems that will outlive his time, and they have been translated already into several world languages. These new poems both look bravely into the future as they turn back, at the same time, to the remembered mists of his childhood. Indran embraces various contradictions in his capacious heart and mind, that have enabled him to love in many languages, to cross all sorts of borders, geographic, linguistic, and political, and to champion liberty of expression wherever he goes. Indran?s is a journey beyond limits, and these poems take you much of the way along with him on his restless exploration of his multiple worlds.
-Shashi Tharoor -
Cosmopolitician
$16About the Book
‘In his latest book Cosmopolitician, Mustansir Dalvi counters the outside world with poems seldom seen in the work of other poets. In seven sections; poems dealing with the larger scheme of life are conveyed in weighted words that are prevented from sinking by the structure and content into which they are placed. He is able to explore a wide range of styles and emotions that carry the reader away. And, as deep into the personal world as literature can take us: :My name is mud, / gold runs in my veins, grouting an imperfect dam that holds.”‘
– Jayanta Mahapatra, author of Sky Without Sky, A False Start and A Rain of Rites -
COLLECTED POEMS
$60About the Book
?Mahapatra?s is an elite art, aimed at a small, discriminating readership.?- Bruce King
Jayanta Mahapatra is indisputably the most innovative, progressive and Anglophile poets of modern India. He is intrinsically touched by the stark realities of our country, and writes instinctively about ? hunger, myths, traditions, customs, rituals, love, passion, anger, frustration, sex, the self and the eternity, the socio-cultural diversity with adroitness. His extant work exudes post ?colonial leanings and spirit invariably. Post- colonialism refers to those theories in texts, political aspirations and modes of activism that spur to challenge structural inequalities and to establish social justice. Mahapatra?s poetry unravels many facets of post- colonialism as haunting past, search for identity and roots. Mahapatra writes to enliven the native tradition protesting the former colonizers and establishing national identity and integrity. He evokes the sense of Indianness both in content and form through his poetry relentlessly. His symbols and images are, however, evocative, suggestive and pivotal for linguistic versatility.- Mirza Sibtain Beg
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Collected Poems
$16About 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.”
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Body Language
$10About the Book
Elegy One by one they fall away, Some gently like brown leaves. Others with gnarled roots Hold fast to their Bleak and emptied plot To which no water or salt, Prayer or miracle can Grant another lease. But sure as the turning days, There will be
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First Infinities
$12About the Book
Hell, or a state very much like it, does feature in Nambisan’s poetic underworld, which is deep, intricate and enticing. …… – From the Preface by Adil Jussawala Nambisan’s view of humankind is bleak, his view of the possibilities of poetry even bleak
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Hieroglyphs
$29About the Book
Hieroglyphs is a translation of Sahitya Akademi Award winning collection in Marathi- Chitralipi by Vasant Abaji Dahake. It has been translated into the English by Rahee Dahake.
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Bookmarking the Oasis
$15About the Book
The poems in Bookmarking the Oasis slide between water and land as they reflect on boundaries, partings, and the identities thrust on us. Luminous, quiet, courageous, Srilata’s poems plunge into the poetics of the everyday, recording fugitive moments with humour, irony and compassion. Nothing escapes the poet?s eye, whether the classroom’s tyranny for both teacher and taught, the blindness of experts, the vulnerabilities of childhood, or the volatile interiors of the human mind. Some poems draw on other poets’ voices, beginning conversations and uncovering strange resonances. Connecting it all is the image of the oasis, unexpected, delicious; a serene, fluid clearing in the mind, bookmarked for later, that allows poetry – and everything else – to happen
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The Owl and the Laughing Buddha
$12About 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.
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Zingonia Zingonechya Kavita
$10About the Book
b.1967 is an internationally well-known Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator. His published works include Chautishiparyantchya Kavita Poems Till Thirty-Four, Thambtach Yet Nahi Just Cant Stop and Ya Roommadhye Aale Ki Life Suru Hote The Moment You Enter This Room, Life Begins. His poems have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The celebrated poet and translator Dilip Chitre translated Chautishiparyantchya Kavita into English and titled the book Virus Alert which then has been translated into Spanish-Alarma De Virus by Zingonia Zingone and in Irish as Folireamh Vris by Gabriel Rosenstock.
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The Acrobat Of Oblivion
$10About the book
Maximum Security Guilt is a jail built around the soul brick on brick it holds back the free movement of the mind, the simple gesture of the heart. Brick on brick the sinful bricklayer learns the mastery of the engineer, of the painstaking.
