Looking In, Looking Out, Shanta Acharya’s third poetry collection, houses fifty-two poems, representing work over a decade. Most of these poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, internationally. The title defines the theme of the collection — the poet and her environment. The collection is a journey, traversing the dimensions of the personal, collective, national and international. The collection’s avant gardism, the empire writing from the cosmopolitan centre, is striking! Acharya’s is a global, poetical vision that projects the internal dimension in conjunction with the external. The critic Glyn Pursglove has rightly commented that Acharya’s poetry “registers her Indian origins without ever being merely exotic”. The collection is comprehensive — there is feminism here and cosmopolitanism, rubbing shoulders with mysticism, intellectualism and lyricism.
January 2006, volume 30, No 1