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A Different Story
$20About the Book
We promise the new year – hope – and we will fill the pitcher.
We will drink sunsets of magic and we will park despair on the way.
We will leave sadness stranded by the light post, solar panelled for tomorrow.And today will still be beautiful.
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In Amlanjyoti Goswami’s third poetry collection, A Different Story, the reader is the ‘owner of the universe’ and ‘all things bright and beautiful’. Mirroring slices of a life spent immersed in the rare solace one finds only in the arts, the poems are contemplative and bathed in the light of strange nostalgia. Ghosts wander these stanzas looking for cups of chai and simple comfort, as do crows, tired elephants and even the beloved dead.
Here, a bonesetter can right the universe if the angle agrees. A lawyer persona asks Krishna and Arjuna questions on the ethics of war and the price of human life. Karna and Kunti reflect on the quirks of destiny. But like all good poets who don’t take themselves too seriously, Amlan sprinkles levity and wit in good measure: an elusive cigarette escapes Fellini; Basho wakes up to cold tea; odes aplenty are put aside for kebabs, cucumbers, pithas and other important loves at ‘first bite’.
The words honour the space around them and when read aloud, they ring with a unique music that travels from the poet’s very own Guwahati and Dilli to faraway New York and even Banalata Sen’s Natore, resting along the way inside a Vinod Kumar Shukla poem. There are many books inside this one. Let the poems guide and glide you over traffic and terrible heat, over monuments and flowing rivers, through the many worlds they inhabit, ‘like a bird resting mid-flight’.– Sohini Basak
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Cold Renewal
$18About 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 PintoCold 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