Showing all 12 results

  • The Compass Bird

    About 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

     

    $15
  • All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)

    About 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

    $16
  • Unmappable Moves

    About 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 DOSHI
     Lethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.
    —JEET THAYIL
    $20
  • UNLIKELY JOURNEY

    About 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.

    $12
  • Stray Poems

    About the Book

    Abhay K. strikes such a cheerful, sensual and sunny note in so many of his individual poems…with a pure, ringing sound and rhythm all of his own.

    —Gabriel Rosenstock, Poet, Ireland

     

    Abhay K. is a trusted guide to modern poetry, to the journey in which we are seeking truth, peace and justice…feel the spirit of God coursing through his lines.

    —Indran Amirthanayagam, Poet, USA

    About the Book

    Stray Poems takes you on a poetic ride across the world, to the moon and planets in our Solar System and to the far reaches of the Universe and then back to our glorious Earth! Bon Voyage!

    $20
  • Encyclopaedia of Forgotten Things

    About The BooK

    Gökçenur Ç distils poetry from of the quotidian, revealing everyday objects, surroundings, and relationships in a new light, marvelling at the miracle of their poetic potential. This is perhaps because he lives the double life of someone whose “perfect routine of a married middle-aged engineer” couldn’t be further from the literary world he inhabits so fully and effortlessly as a poet, translator, festival organiser and initiator of many exchanges and poetry translation gatherings. All these roles are indispensable, and in his poems, he pays equal homage to the great poets he has translated, the poet friends of his generation some of whom have translated him, the woman he shares his life with — and language itself, often at odds with all the words that populate his universe. This long overdue English edition of his selected poems with a list of translation credits and acknowledgements not only makes his work available to a new readership, but also tells a story of deep affinities, friendships and collaborations that are the lifeblood of his creative practice.

    – Alexandra Buchler, Director of LAF Literature Across Frontiers

    “What a vigorous, deep thinking, and companionable voice is Gokcenur C.’s. He may be a new poet to us English speakers and readers, but he’s been active and well-respected in European circles, and especially in Turkish contemporary literature, for many years now. Encyclopedia of Forgotten Things offers us a big-hearted gathering of his rich narrative lyrics—poems of family, culture, and cities of “soaked neighborhoods,” poems of brilliant aphorisms (“Stones grow heavier where they stand”) and expansive attentions, poems of sorrow, eroticism, and a bountiful yearning for natural connections: “If could speak urdu / I would teach urdu to the rain….” The clarity of Gokcenur C.’s poetic idiom is especially striking—intimate, friendly, and possessed of an intense depth of passion, personal intelligence, and social engagement. It’s a poetry elixir made of measurement, music, and that intangible ingredient, soulfulness. Add paradox, his primary tool, and you have Gokcenur C.’s deepest delightful secret in Encyclopedia of Forgotten Things. If something is forgotten, how can it be catalogued for our reference, our pleasure? Maybe that’s been poetry’s magic, all along.”

    – David Baker, Poet, Editor Kenyon Review

     

    The poetry of Gökçenur Ç is vibrantly alive and teeming with images, full of the details and patterns of everyday life while alert to the larger forces that shape it. It is ‘world’ poetry in that it engages as eloquently with the textures of locality as it does the global communities of writers and translators with which it is in dialogue. A quiet pulse of humour runs though this fine selection in which the universe is animated, made strange, and returned to us full of meaning in ‘the scribble of the space’.

    – Zoë Skoulding, Poet, Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing, Bangor University

    $20
  • WALK

    About the Book

    This is a breath-taking experiment involving three poets, four languages, a pandemic and a million miles of migration. You will not find a bleeding heart here nor any cheap sentiment. Here is a watchful eye and a savage tongue. Here is a calligrapher’s pen and a bow to Ezra Pound. Mustansir Dalvi’s poetry has always meant something more to me than the best words in the best order. Here he shows us the order of things in a disordered world and we are humbled by this act of bravery and of empathy.

    Jerry Pinto, poet and translator

    Asylum, I want a poem and other poems

    First published as an e-chapbook by Yavanika Press in that dreadful plague year, 2020, Mustansir Dalvi’s brilliant and memorable WALK is an act of homage to the suffering of those millions of Indians, already living precariously between village and metropolis, who were turned into migrants in their own land – forced to walk thousands of miles home, on what was effectively a death march, by a callous State and a society that improvises rather than systematising effective forms of compassion.

    WALK now returns, under the Poetrywala imprint, as a surging polyphony. Dalvi is joined in this splendid quadriga of a book by Hemant Divate and Udayan Thakker, who have translated these poems into Marathi and Gujarati respectively; the author has rendered himself into a vibrant Hindi. This relay of versions is completed by Sudhir Patwardhan’s painterly testimony to the anguish of the Covid refugees caught up in a humanitarian catastrophe. A poet and translator, Dalvi infuses his writing with multilingual resonance and quicksilver diversity, shuttling among idioms and registers, in-group argot and makeshift patois. As befits the gravity and universal urgency of its subject, this book will reach readers in four languages simultaneously, saying to them, to us: Never forget!

    Ranjit Hoskote, Poet, art critic and cultural theorist

    $20