India

Abstract

Then the world shone, by their showing; then publishers seemed to care;Then calls for cheques of last year's owing did not fall on empty air.Then newspapers asked them for pieces; and printed them unchanged; and paid; But now there are so many wheezes which make the craft a thrifty trade. This idea finds resonance in "The Corporate Poet". In poems such as "Medical Entry" and "Pill" the language of science drives home the idea that "life remains fatal". Jeet Thayil's Collected Poems presents new and unpublished poems along with selections from his earlier published collections. About 52 new poems express a marked realization of the loss of faith, with references to God and mythological characters. In "Separation" the towns are inhabited by ghosts: "Town of ghosts, where I or some other breathes/ the black unchangeable estrangement." In poems like "Rules for Citizens" or "53 Views of Abstraction, 1 Rhyme, 0 Blackbirds" the point form is used to compress and present ideas in numbered lines. The section "From the Book of Chocolate Saints" uncovers the seamy side of life in short poems on saints.I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: An Adil Jussawalla Reader is a compilation of Jussawalla's poems, fiction, and non-fiction. The new poems find place alongside selections from earlier collections -The Right Kind of Dog (2013), Trying to Say Goodbye (2011), Missing Person (1976), and Land's End (1962. His poetry spans an epoch: from the 1960s to the present day; from the Nehruvian idealism to the globalized world with its contradictions. "Kite" (a poem written for Tenzin Tsundue) traces the free-flowing movement of a kite from a flat to the slab above a closed window as it waits to land. Prose poems kindle thought and allow imagination to float along the lines. The image of the "castaway" given water, the fish-head in "Evolution After A Fashion-1" or the professor in "Evolution after a Fashion-2" carve specific images in the mind.Kerala-born poet and dance producer/curator Karthika Nair retells the Mahabharata from the point of view of 18 marginal characters in Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata. After Bearings (2009), this is her second collection of poems. Chinua Achebe's lines from The Paris Review form the epigraph and emphasize the need to rewrite history, because "until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter". Written in the form of a series of dramatic monologues in both prose and verse, the book presents the perspective of the women (Satyavati, Poorna, Sauvali, to name a few) and the "Padavits" or the foot-soldiers. Karthika employs every kind of prosody -three-line stanzas, four-line stanzas, visual poetry, even experiments with typography, where the foot-soldier's view appears in grey ink. Menka Shivdasani's third collection Safe House focuses on the social marginalization and exploitation of women in varied forms. From the woman in the kitchen to the Khasi woman in Shillong, her poems paint a disturbing canvas of pain and rebellion. In "Bird-Woman" she...