Description

When did you become a poet of adjectivesroosting in the rafters of a broken house Ghalib, the owl must hide in the tamarind for now, but the genies of havoc will go on furlough soon. You say your ink-well is empty, but your dry quillstill claws at the fibres of the heart. Ghalib in the Winter of the Great RevoltVanishing Acts by Ranjit Hoskot, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award 2004, brings together some of his best poetry, drawn from his three published collections, along with a substantial body of new poems. While continuing to explore the interplay between the epic, devastating sweep of historical events and an intimate, often vulnerable, self, his new poems dwell on emigrants, fugitives, interpreters, double agentssurvivors who walk the fragile border between eternity and transience. Experimenting with a variety of formsranging from the canticle to the cycle, the adapted sonnet to the passionate apostrophe Hoskot expresses the anxieties and delights of a transitive self that constantly shifts location, and evokes strikingly the worlds that can open up at the edges of memory, identity and language.