Showing 41–60 of 107 results

  • Like Earth to Stars

    About 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.

    $20
  • Equator

    About 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

    $12
  • The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans

    About 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

    $16
  • How We Measured Time

    About the Book

    “How we Measured Time by Sivakami Velliangiri, gives us poetry of a childhood remembered, perhaps now and then fictionalised –memory is such a dicey thing.  The poetry is rooted in nostalgia, memories rooted in the house and the mill compound she grew up in, and yet there is no sentimentality attached to it. There are moments when the poetry is uplifting, her mother identifying ‘serpents/ by the design of their costume’, a grandfather lifting her ‘to the coastline of his shoulders’. And a past advances towards the reader, the silence before a solar eclipse, the hubbub of a Kerala elephant-chase.’

    – Keki Daruwala

    $12
  • Greece, a modern Odyssey: selected essays

    About the Book

    This outstanding collection of personal essays, sharp analysis, unusual photographs, and poetic reflections focuses on Greece and its people as they found themselves in the eye of a storm that continues to shake Europe and the world. Ranging widely from economics and politics to social and environmental issues, and from cultural and diasporic interactions to literature and the arts, the essays and other materials have been put together in ways that attract, inform, and challenge the reader no matter where she or he may reside. Presenting a roster of distinguished contributors, the editors offer a variety of perspectives, points of information, and allusions, which substantially add to ongoing debates on how individuals and groups may proceed in challenging circumstances. Greece: A Modern Odyssey is being published by Mumbai-based Paperwall Media & Publishing, in memory of the late Hatto Fischer, the German poet and philosopher who lived in Greece and brought this volume together with his wife Anna Arvanitaki.

    $24
  • River Wedding

    About 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

    $16
  • Coconuts on Mars

    About 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

     

    $12
  • Architecture of Flesh

    About the Book

    Ra Sh’s poems stand out in the world of Indian poetry in English because of their uniqueness in attitude and style. He has an eye for apt metaphors and ample adjectives that articulate the semantics of violence that have come to define our times: political, patriarchal and communal. The intensity of his concern perfectly matches the sharpness of his images. It is no wonder that his poems often seem like a ritual procession of self-flagellating devotees of a heartless god doling out selected torments or like aesthetic lessons in the anatomy of gore exposing the visceral asymmetries of existential angst. And during all the painful coitus, his poetry sings, yes, sings in many stabbing tongues invoking conversations in blood.
    – K. Satchidanandan

    $12
  • Cosmopolitician

    About 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

    $16
  • The Painter of Evenings

    About the Book

    Your poems are exceptional… My admiration grows for your poems – Jayanta Mahapatra.

    Kottoor is a poet who has discovered his own voice distinct from that of his ancestors or his compeers. ? Dr Ayyappa Paniker

    I earnestly believe that you are one of the most committed and ardent lovers of poetry. At my age (92), I would like to say—God bless you! With deep affection and admiration. – Shiv K Kumar

    Gopikrishnan Kottoor is one of the most exciting voices of the 90?s.- Chandrabhaga

    Thoroughly localized, yet universal. ? The Quest

    $20
  • COLLECTED POEMS

    About 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

    $60
  • Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe

    About the Book

    E. V. Ramakrishnan’s unique voice has reached another level of intensity in this new book of poems. He does not hark back to lost utopias or invoke dystopias. His poetry rips apart language to reach down to the palpable truth of experience. It aims at nothing short of the impossible: to hold together the ever expanding universe in an epiphany of the immediate.
    -H.S. Shivaprakash

    E. V. Ramakrishnan?s poems spin across metaphor and statement with fluid ease, often veering at the edge of axiom. There is an ability to combine elegy and irony, image and indictment, to blur the distinction between the mundane and the make-believe while never losing the sharp knife-blade of moral concern.
    -Arundhathi Subramaniam

    $12
  • Collected Poems

    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.”

    $16
  • Elsewhere Where Else

    About the Book

    Sampurna Chattarji and Eurig Salisbury are two of the ten poets from India and Wales who took part in a project organized by Literature Across Frontiers and partners to mark the 70th anniversary of independent India. The poets collaborated to create new work and translate each other into their respective languages during a series of residencies in both countries, alternating between the hustle and bustle of Indian metropolises and the peace and quiet of welsh towns and rural locations. The project addressed, in a myriad ways, the theme of ?independence?. In artistic practice, independence means freedom to think, act and create beyond the confines of convention and economic necessity. But successful independence-of communities and individuals alike-also involves co-independence, collaboration and understanding across divides and differences. At a time of global change which sees increasing friction between identities, we hope this project has helped to open up a unique dialogue and formulate new narratives and ideas which both uncover and move beyond histories.

    $20
  • Absent Muses

    About the Book

    Cities So tell me. Is it hot? Does it rain? Are there places you can sit on a sunny day, away from the crowd? Is it beautiful? Is it loud? What do the streets smell like? What do the women wear? Are they pretty? Do you love it? Could you leave?

    $10
  • Body Language

    About 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

    $10
  • For Hire

    About the Book

    At the Seminar The door creaks like the wail of some small animal. I am terrified: the present speaker like the ones before him will make me aware of how little I know. Both of us open our mouths at the same time, he to read his paper, I to yawn.

    $12