It is a tragic irony of our times that the cultural space for poetry is fast shrinking in our midst, and so are its readers and/or publishers. Known to us, humans, as one of the most primordial and also sublime forms of self-expression, poetry is moving out of our lives, almost imperceptibly. Sadly enough, the poetry that speaks the real language of the human heart, doesn’t appear to have many takers, at least, in our hyper-real times.
It is difficult to review this book, as the smooth writing tempts you to pause and ruminate on techniques used, which inspires you to attempt a few pieces. Nikita Parik’s poems are lessons in creative writing. Both My City is a Murder of Crows, and her debut collection Diacritics of Desire, are important reads for emerging poets working on their craft. Invariably, Parik will teach them concise writing.
Dazzlingly unpredictable, Ra Sh’s recent collection of poems, Buddha and Biryani, constructs a world of perception that is playfully irreverent but trenchantly real. The poet, known for his seductively tantalizing referentiality of erotica in The Architecture of Flesh (2015) and The Bullet Train (2019), strikes the raw chords of the readers again.
The cover of this slim volume of poems is of a flower blossoming and the uneven lines drawn on every petal sets the tone for the ideas that are enclosed within its spaces. On first glance, one is not prepared for what follows inside the book. The stereotypical set of ideas pertaining to flowers and colour schemes that one has been conditioned to, and the way one casually looks at the surface, does not prepare us for the powerful assemblage of poems that will shake you to your core.
Archana Shah’s Crafting a Future—Stories of Indian Textiles and Sustainable Practices is organized in three sections—the story of cotton, the story of silk, the story of wool—along with a foreword by Laila Tyabji, an introduction, an afterword, appendices I and II, acknowledgements, photo credits, bibliography, and an index.
At the outset I must confess that I have never been a Bollywood aficionado and that I have not ever seen a film where Kabir Bedi had acted. Yet, I find his life, vignettes of which he has sensitively narrated in his memoir, unusually interesting, sometime even profound. In fact, after completing the book that mixes adroitly the profane with the sacred, I feel tempted to know more about him.