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Variations on Silence
$16About the Book
Throughout Variations on Silence, Nadia Mifsud draws us into intimate scenes and gestures,
as if overhearing lovers mid-conversation. The central figure – almost mythic in scale – is
silence itself, which Mifsud imbues with weight, texture, physical presence. Silence shelters,
stirs, shakes, unwinds, “tastes / of red soil and conifer.” Miriam Calleja’s translation conveys
the ache and longing of that silence with a sensual clarity rare in English. A fabulous book.
– John Wall Barger, The Elephant of SilenceAs Dante said, love is what moves the sun and the other stars – but it is also what flows
through all things, binding them together. This is what breathes in the silences – namely, in
the poems – of Nadia Mifsud : a listening rooted in love, which through love transforms and
reintegrates lovers into the cosmos, restoring the world to something deeply connected to
our humanity. Calleja’s admirable translation – herself a poet – captures this dynamic with
striking clarity and preserves it as the central energy of the work. The encounter between
these two poets ultimately offers us a book of poetry, not merely a book of poems – I repeat:
a cohesive and coherent work, held together by a vision both profound and vast. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Rilke’s Duino Elegies… The poetry found in this book is capable of
traversing time and resisting it, of crossing space to bind us – irrevocably – to this cosmos,
and in that bond, to reveal the secret of life.– Pietro Federico, Most of the Stars
Every verb in Nadia Mifsud's work shimmers, echoes, and rappels down the cliffside of a
stanza. Valences expand through repetition; "waves like jaws" locate the oceanic motion. One physically hears and feels the island of Malta in the tension between the isolation,
refrain, and the sea returning to shore, empty-handed. Miriam Calleja's attentive translation brings these affects and "sea-scented places" into English without forsaking the resonances and echoes of "cockleshells" past. Variations on Silence touches the hem where displacement circles the idea of place and results in lyric. The mode is modern; the echoes are ancient; the book is irresistible.– Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies
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Folie Á Deux
$18About the Book
Jennifer Robertson’s first book of poems, Folie à Deux, introduces us to an assured and sophisticated new voice in the world of Anglophone poetry in India. Robertson celebrates the sensuousness, the warm flesh of language. Her poems sharpen our awareness of things viscerally experienced, our memories of things held and cherished, our desire to secure forever the ephemeral yet compelling images of photography and cinema. In her handling, the resonance of the breath crafted into sound takes concrete occupancy of its environment, becomes a percussive force; she writes: “I wonder about sound invading space, wounding, astounding space and stories rising like a Phoenix.”
Here is a poet who captivates us, enchants us into spaces that “have two doors and no exit”.
– Ranjit Hoskote, author of Jonahwhale
Jennifer Robertson’s poems invite us to a world of “intimate strangeness” where poetry is “nuts and waywardness” and poets are “hoodlums” who leave behind “delinquencies” as their legacy. Although thickly silted with references to literature, painting and cinema, this is not a world of glibness or slick cultural sophistication. A throbbing vein of disquiet runs through Folie à Deux reminding us of relationships that could lean towards “darkness and magic”; lives lived in “intermission” with fragments spilling over “in the dark, under the seat”; and a self that yearns to drown into “a sunken civilisation”. This is a poetry of crafted surfaces and unexpected trenches, beeping microwaves and buried cities – allusive and “alluvial” all at once. Folie à Deux is a strong, self-assured début.
– Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Wild Women
Lexically restless, geodesic, and unapologetically omnivorous, Jennifer Robertson’s Folie à Deux is a dialectic that considers the fulcra of observance and animacy, liberation and stagnancy, tranquility and obsession. Robertson’s poetry applies a painterly heat to our bodies, and readers to scratch at persona, and to map a self through the historical detritus of art and signs. What disturbs me most about this book is that, ravenously, Robertson “reinvents time travel”.
– Jhani Randhawa, author of Time Regime
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Bewilderness
$30About the Book
Devashish Makhija’s Bewilderness announces its visceral bridging of self and nature in its title. The baffling challenges are outside the self, coming at the self as a profusion of stimuli from the mega-city, nature’s receding kingdom, and the horrors of the political. But they are inside the self too, as it fashions itself from fragments of childhood memory, responses to paintings that hold out inspiration, and empathetic connections forged with vulnerable Others in predicaments of distress. These poems bear resonant witness to the age in which they are written – an age governed by the call of the siren and the insistence of the curfew, the militarization of civil life and the degradation of rivers and mountains. Bewilderness captivates us with its vividly palpable images, its exhilarating shifts of tempo, and its plangent, deeply moving tonality.
– Ranjit Hoskote
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Nivdak AbhidhaNantar
$50About the Book
अभिधा सुरू असताना ग्लोबलायझेशझेनची प्रक्रिया सुरू झाली होती. आमच्या काही कविता आणि याच दरम्यान स्वतःला आलेलं जगण्याचं नवं भान, ग्लोबलायझेशझेनमुळेमुळे बदललेला भोवताल आणि या सर्वांमुळे उमजलेले लिहिण्याचंही नवीन भान ह्या ‘अभिधा’मधून आम्ही दिलेल्या किंवा आम्ही मिळविलेल्या काही गोष्टी.
१९९९ मध्ये अभिधा नंतर सुरू केलं तेव्हा ग्लोबलायझेशझेनचा परिणाम असलेले साहित्य आम्ही प्रसिद्ध करू असे धोरण होते आणि २०१४ साली अभिधानंतर बंद करेपर्यंत आम्ही ते लावून धरले. ग्लोबलायझेशनंतर जीवनाप्रमाणे साहित्यही बदलत होतं. हा बदल पकडण्याचा, डॉक्युमेण्ट करण्याचा, नवीन साहित्य लोकांपर्यंत पोहोचविण्याचा उद्देश होता. हा अवकाश ग्लोबलायझेशन’नंतर’चा आणि एका अर्थाने ‘अभिधा”नंतरचा’ अवकाश होता. या पुस्तकातून अभिधानंतरमध्ये प्रकाशित झालेल्या निवडक कविता, लेख, मुलाखती आणि संपादकीय देत आहोत. या सर्व लिखाणां मधून ग्लोबलायझेशन आणि डिजिटालायझेशनंतर निरंतर बदलत असलेली भाषा, संस्कृती,आणि जगणं अधोरेखित होतं. मराठीत सध्या लिहिणाऱ्या, वाचणाऱ्या, विचार करणाऱ्या, भाषेची आणि संस्कृतीची चिंता करणाऱ्या आणि भाषेसाठी झगडणाऱ्या लोकांसाठी हे पुस्तक खूप महत्त्वाचा दस्तऐवज ठरू शकेल याची खात्री आहे.
Feeling happy to see great documentation of our work in Marathi from the late nineteen nineties. Abhidhanantar was a major movement in Marathi that self-consciously highlighted the transformation of our society and culture due to the processes of the post-1989 phase of hyper globalisation that has created the world as we understand today. Our generation was at
the cusp of the dying old analogue world that the modernist and identitarian generation of the Cold War period we had inherited, and the emergent new world of digital natives we gave birth to. Our poetry, world view and thinking documents this shift and this was the periodical that provided the platform to express this discourse. It brought together and created not only new voices like Sanjeev Khandekar, Saleel Wagh, Shridhar Tilwe, Hemant Divate, Manya Joshi, Nitin Kulkarni, Mangesh Narayanrao Kale, Arun Kale, Varjesh Solanki and Nitin Rindhe among many
others but also created a new readership in Marathi.– Sachin Ketkar
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Life on a Bridge
$30About 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 Compass Bird
$15About the Book
Observant and meditative, lit with gentle whimsy, Siddhartha Menon’s work on the animal world leads us from ornithology to ontology, detail to dazzling insight, in a wingbeat. Here is a book in which the reverie of snails, the ‘mynahness’ of mynahs, the unhurried gaze of nilgai, becomes a way to reflect on all the eternal questions—time, belonging, love, purpose, a world ‘stained with stillness’, in which ‘those who attend have the last word’. One of the most delightful new books of poetry I have read this year.
– Arundhathi Subramaniam
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All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)
$16About the Book
Dear Sanjeev,
I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity
in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too. That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence. What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life. Of course, I think it's significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
Yours
Hemant Divate
August 28, 2004 -
All that I Wanna Do (English)
$16About Book
Dear Sanjeev
I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too.
That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence.
What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life.
Of course, I think it’s significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
Yours
Hemant Divate
August 28, 2004
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Obsessed with Life
$10About the Book
“Mozetič’s verse conjures a distinctly gay way of looking at the world. It is both placid and paranoid, opening the world into paper-thin layers of sex, loneness and non-disingenuous self-reflection. His lyric has a remarkable flow, his language is persuasively simple, and his tone is forthright, all of which give the shattered heart at the core of this book a strange magnetic force.”
– Akhil Katyal, poet, translator, scholar and queer activist
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Salt & Pepper
$20About 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…. -
Between Seas
$10About the Book
Elizabeth Grech’s poems are featherlight and firefly. They are moon and water, star and sky. There is in them such strength that only the elemental can contain. She marks the brutal moments of separation with such candour and delicacy, I marvel at her gift. Love of every hue finds a place here—maternal, filial, fraternal, sensual. Love of her native Malta of blessed seas and sunkissed land; love for lost wildness; never-blind, always-aware that love will break into smithereens, only to be gathered and tested again. Beautifully translated into an English that allows her poems to nestle, shape within shape, sound within sound, a series of small, sensitive unfurlings. Unafraid of evanescence, Grech repairs our mortal hurts. Anyone who has ever loved a child, a woman, a man, a sibling, a parent, a homeland will find in these pages a poet’s tender ministrations.
— SAMPURNA CHATTARJI
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Unmappable Moves
$20About the Book
Reading Unmappable Moves, I had the strangest sensation of time expanding and closing in. These are taut, enigmatic poems—lightning flashes with bright, insistent heartbeats.—TISHANI DOSHILethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.—JEET THAYIL -
UNLIKELY JOURNEY
$12About the Book
As happens on all trips, in the pages of this book we find unforeseen questions and unexpected landscapes. These verses are transparent because they speak to us not about what is intuited or remembered but what is seen while trying to establish order, specify limits, and vanquish shadows.
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Where Is the Mouth of That Word?
$16About 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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Lighthouse for drowning memories
$16About the Book
It’s in Delhi, dystopian as ever, that Sujatha Mathai continues to live and write today, and I fear her words—“I cannot save my city / Against the degradation of dust”—will echo long into the future, acquiring new meanings. And yet I’m so happy to read a new book of hers, to see that she’s still writing her poems sharp and clear as glass, full of sympathy for the world and those who suffer. It makes me feel that literature survives and helps us survive, that it carries more continuity than we think.
— Vivek Narayanan
Assistant Professor, Department of English, George Mason University -
Only the Forest Knows
$20About the Book
“Wings sense what they must”. And poets too. In her third poetry collection, Anindita Sengupta receives and transmits the hues of a planet mad with want, fear, breakdown. At the heart of a maelstrom of (in)humanity and conflagration, dispossession and disease, her poems bite and rage and mourn. From forage fish to polar bears, she is enmeshed and implicated. With her, we sense the natural world’s mysteries as apprehensible, but “not teachable”. In these poems, breath is the seam that will rip and tear; pain the only climate we can count on. As we embrace deception and vulnerability, we coil in and out of the quieter spaces we contain and are contained by. Hers is our hunger to understand, even hope, so that we might begin again to believe in “small miracles”, to persist, like the algae, “in a world without light.”
– Sampurna Chattarji
Anindita Sengupta asks: “How to speak of violence without /repeating it. What language? What tone? What / memory?” Throughout this coruscating collection, her fluid and inventive poiesis attempts to answer these questions, weaving contingent and deeply human meanings out of personal and collective trauma. Only the Forest Knows is a profoundly accomplished, intelligent work. Sengupta creates an urgent, sensual language that speaks out of the raw contradictions and anguish of the present. This is a poetry tempered by fire, loss and sorrow that
yet, as Rilke said, “nevertheless still praises”: a hard-won beauty that is its own hope.—Alison Croggon
