Indian English Poetry Research Articles

Affective politics and reading/writing poetry from the Northeast of India

ABSTRACTTheorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions ‘affect’ as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere.

Representation of the Voiceless:

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), a major figure in the history of Indian English poetry, deals with a wide range of themes including the representation of the voiceless in his vast oeuvre of poetry. His poetic world is suffused with a variety of images, both urban and sylvan, and his poetry presents readers with people of different backgrounds from around the whole country. The poet depicts individuals from different strata of society who represent a great part of India. Some of his poems highlight distresses of the underprivileged people in various communities of India. Ezekiel shows that these people go through difficult times without having attention or empathy of the elites. Treated as the “other,” the poverty-stricken people cannot raise their voice though their struggle for survival continues. Ezekiel, a leading post-independence poet, represents his locale – many of his poems portray the actualities of Indian life. This article is an attempt to explore a selection of Ezekiel’s poems in order to find out how the marginalized people in India are exploited and oppressed, how they are deprived of their basic rights, how they suffer psychologically, how they are silenced, and how the poet strives to give voice to the voiceless.

A platform for poetry: The PEN All-India Centre and a Bombay poetry scene

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a brief history of the PEN All-India Centre in Bombay, before examining the role it has played in supporting Indian poets working in English. This organization has long constituted a vital meeting place for established and emerging poets, and must be recognized as an integral location in the history of Indian poetry in English. From the late 1960s in particular, poetry began to feature more prominently in the Centre’s calendar of events and its magazine The Indian PEN – reflecting wider literary and cultural shifts taking place across the city, as well as the role of individuals in shaping the organization. This analysis of the PEN All-India Centre offers a new and historical perspective, not only of a single institution, but also of Bombay’s literary culture, which has been so often occluded by accounts of the city as what Rashmi Varma has called a “cacophonic, polyvocal space of difference”.

In Conversation with D.C. Chambial

D.C. Chambial is a poet, short-story writer, critic, reviewer, translator. He writes in English, Hindi and Pahari language of Himachal Pradesh. He has served HP Education Department at various places in Himachal Pradesh for about 38 years and retired as Associate Professor of English. The Muse attracted him when he was still at high school and began to bear fruits in his college days. His first poem appeared in Skylark, an international magazine of poetry in 1979. His first collection of poems, Broken Images (1983) has since been followed by seven more anthologies: The Cargoes of the Bleeding Hearts & Other Poems (1984), Perceptions (1986), Gyrating Hawks & Sinking Roads (1996), Before the Petals Unfold (2002), This Promising Age & Other Poems (2004), Mellow Tones (2009), and Words (2010). All these eight volumes have been published in one book – Words: 1979-2010 (2012) – by Aadi Publications from Jaipur. In 2014, he published Hour of Antipathy. Currently working on another anthology to be published later in 2017.His poems have also been translated into several languages; his English poems have been published world-wide. He participated in Word Congress of Poets in Madras and 6th World Poetry Day in Gangtok (Sikkim) besides many UGC Seminars of Indian English Poetry and Literature. Edits Poetcrit (since 1988), an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to literary criticism and contemporary poetry. Winner of several medals (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) and awards from USA, Australia and India including the Michael Madhusudan Academy Award (1995) and Lifetime Achievement Award from Intercontinental Poetry Academy (2009). Contact: editorpoetcrit@gmail.com

Lion Brothers

Saleem Peeradina. Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems. New Delhi. Copper Coin. 2017. 166 pages. As a publication format, the “new and selected poems” allows a poet’s corpus to grow incrementally and retrospectively at the same time, with each new collection adding a group of recent, uncollected poems to a selection from previous books. It gives poets an opportunity to remain in print, although one offset by the challenge of self-assessment and self-revision. Despite the title, Saleem Peeradina’s latest collection does not include any new (i.e., unpublished) poems but a comprehensive and sensible selection from his five previous books, featuring half of First Offence (1980), Group Portrait (1992), and Slow Dance (2010), a little less than half of Meditations on Desire (2003), and less than 25 percent of Final Cut (2016). However, since most of these books were published outside of India, the selection is effectively new for the subcontinental readers who represent its intended audience. And it may even help “rectify [its author’s] neglect” in his native country, as Keki Daruwalla advocates in the foreword, or at least reintroduce a poet who is often remembered mostly, and somewhat reductively , in connection with an influential and still relevant anthology. The militant editor of Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection (1972) would become the angry young man of First Offence, whose free-verse probing pronouncements, charged with an inquisitive energy, lead occasionally to a devotional stance, as with the prayerful endings of “Bandra” (the old Bombay neighborhood), “There Is No God,” and “The Real Thing.” With time, and the experience of relocation to the United States, this poetic stance undergoes a process of sublimation, becoming evocative rather than invocatory. What is called on is not the deity (in its various incarnations ) but the dead, or time past (and passing). Thirty years after “Bandra,” “The Old Neighborhood” (from Slow Dance) employs the second person to describe a chance encounter with an old friend rather than to engage the plurality and diversity of the Bombay/Mumbai suburb in a verbal close-up. While Group Portrait represents the record of a passage (from one world to another, from youth to maturity, from individual to family life, and from free verse to more measured, stanzaic forms), Slow Dance is a reflection on this experience and its many adjustments and reassessments. It is a long and difficult process of selfexamination and self-discovery, forged by the daily exercise of “allowing pain / to preserve the distance / which welds our world together” (“Group Portrait”) and leading to an understanding, and acceptance, that “Remaining whole is no longer the point: / It’s staying divided, attaining equipoise” (“Michigan Basement 2”). As the poet’s view evolves from the panoramic to the personal and the particular , his stance becomes more reflective, his stanzas more composed, and his lines longer. In Final Cut, Peeradina’s cameraeye remains sharp and inquisitive but with a more circumscribed range, focusing on realities that are—metaphorically and literally —closer to home: birds observed in the backyard, objects of everyday use, exotic fruits, and the “early settlers” that, “entering the bloodstream bearing / Gifts from their twin lineages,” will eventually take us down. Although published in India, Heart’s Beast’s selection will suit and gratify any anglophone reader with more than a passing interest in well-crafted, perceptive, and thought-provoking poetry. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Leona Sevick. Lion Brothers. WinstonSalem , North Carolina. Press 53. 2017. 63 pages. Lion Brothers, Leona Sevick’s first fulllength poetry collection, is named for the textile factory where the poet’s Korean mother worked. While the collection is, in part, about the poet’s working-class parents, it is also a profound exploration of domestic life and its discontents. “I have something to tell you,” a seemingly benign sentence, is the emotional whirlpool around which Lion Brothers swirls. In its first speaking, the sentence is World Literature in Review 84 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 directed to the poet’s mother by her husband , the poet’s father. In the second, it is directed to the poet-speaker by her own husband, and, both times, it is a prologue to...

Exploring Sensibility in Modern Indian English Drama

The Indian English Drama has developed as an important and versatile body of English Literature and has caught attention of the global audiences. It has made a substantial progress by encapsulating various issues that India has been facing from time to time. It finds its impetus from Indian sensibility, philosophy, myths and religious beliefs and attracted attention of the people beyond boundaries. When one goes through the history of Indian English Drama, one comes to know that it has made a little progress than Indian English Fiction and Poetry. Though Indian English Drama came to the scene before these above-mentioned genres but failed to keep pace with them because of some reasons. Unlike Fiction and Poetry, Drama cannot be restricted to reading only. It needs a theatre, an encouraging audience, effective dialogues, efficient actors and other stagecraft. Indian English Drama passes many phases and at last comes to a whole new range of playwrights who have left no stone unturned to give it its due place. The present paper studies Indian English Drama with all its flaws and highlights the contribution of Modern Indian English Playwrights.

I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky

“Spearhafoc” is another example. The title plays upon the bellicose phrase “spearhavoc ,” but it actually means the modern sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) who speaks the poem. Norse mercenaries, medieval highwaymen, and modern outdoors enthusiasts share the protagonist’s role with the birds they watch, the fields they trespass upon, and the thousand-year-old groves on Ringstone Hill. Englaland is fertile ground for environmental literary criticism. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Zilka Joseph. Sharp Blue Search of Flame. Detroit. Wayne State University Press. 2016. 116 pages. If the American critic Stephen Burt’s precepts for reading new poetry—look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot—are to be heeded, then Zilka Joseph’s first book eminently meets those criteria. In addition to a distinct persona inhabiting a world of dual cultures, Joseph also makes an argument. Her subject matter and her language are shaped by two worlds—her Indian heritage and her residence in America—and her persona is molded by diverse influences , including Indian mythology and epic heroes, Hindu festivals, Jewish customs , growing up in Kolkata, the violence of rape and bride-burning, the experience of migration and the resulting dislocation, American folk music, and Mozart. She has a particular sensitivity to the natural world of birds, reptiles, flowers, and whales as well as the American outdoors. Joseph has a wonderful ability to combine the concerns of one poem (“Something Falls”) to echo the contents of another one (“The Blessed”). In the first, a girl nursing a childhood crush is diagnosed with polio (“I drag my wounded body / the way I will do / for the rest of my life”), and in the second, a wounded bird is rescued and given shelter (“my wild, starved, onelegged one”). In “Dharamsala,” a pilgrimage-trek draws in the Himalayan backdrop, steep climbs, and market-square stops and blends cozily with the intimacies of conjugal love. “Prey” exposes the familiar, materialistic trap of a marriage starting wrong resulting in domestic violence. Joseph uses understatement to depict the woman’s predicament rather than employ a strident, angry tone. In “Havan,” she gets more daring , getting the poem’s structure to zigzag across the page to mimic the household chase as a young bride is set on fire. On the other hand, “What Burns” could have gained from further elaboration. Less successful are her forays into Hindu mythology and her musings on goddesses, which seem to me to be assertions of female spirituality. Similarly, her attempt at creating a word-equivalent of mudras, in “The Bharat Natyam Dancer,” doesn’t entirely come off. Where Zilka Joseph excels is in her recording of family stories; the memories are photographic in their sharpness and unflinching in their revelations. She is equally adept in her handling of form to suit the needs of each poem. Altogether, a strong debut collection. Saleem Peeradina Siena Heights University Adil Jussawalla. I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky. Gurgaon, India. Hachette India. 2015. 376 pages. Having been part of the resurgence of Indian poetry in English that was very much Bombay-centered, Adil Jussawalla brought out a brilliant debut collection called Land’s End in 1962. His precursor was Nissim Ezekiel (generally acknowledged as the founding father of postindependence Indian poetry in English), who Shauna Osborn Arachnid Verve Mongrel Empire Press Drawing threads of Comanche, Spanish, and Oklahoma culture into one eclectic tapestry, Shauna Osborn delivers a spellbinding collection in Arachnid Verse. Populated with memories that are both intimate to the writer and universally applicable, Osborn grapples with issues of gender, sexuality, and identity with equal measures of humor, anger, and grit. Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry Ed. & trans. Margaret Randall Duke University Press This anthology serves as a broad, bilingual survey of Cuban poets born during the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to diversity, with women making up nearly half of the authors represented. While it’s difficult to make generalizations about style with so many on display, the sum effect is that of a time-lapse shot taken over multiple generations that shows a kind of undeniable truth about the essence of Cuban poets and their craft (see WLT...

Sharp Blue Search of Flame

“Spearhafoc” is another example. The title plays upon the bellicose phrase “spearhavoc ,” but it actually means the modern sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) who speaks the poem. Norse mercenaries, medieval highwaymen, and modern outdoors enthusiasts share the protagonist’s role with the birds they watch, the fields they trespass upon, and the thousand-year-old groves on Ringstone Hill. Englaland is fertile ground for environmental literary criticism. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Zilka Joseph. Sharp Blue Search of Flame. Detroit. Wayne State University Press. 2016. 116 pages. If the American critic Stephen Burt’s precepts for reading new poetry—look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot—are to be heeded, then Zilka Joseph’s first book eminently meets those criteria. In addition to a distinct persona inhabiting a world of dual cultures, Joseph also makes an argument. Her subject matter and her language are shaped by two worlds—her Indian heritage and her residence in America—and her persona is molded by diverse influences , including Indian mythology and epic heroes, Hindu festivals, Jewish customs , growing up in Kolkata, the violence of rape and bride-burning, the experience of migration and the resulting dislocation, American folk music, and Mozart. She has a particular sensitivity to the natural world of birds, reptiles, flowers, and whales as well as the American outdoors. Joseph has a wonderful ability to combine the concerns of one poem (“Something Falls”) to echo the contents of another one (“The Blessed”). In the first, a girl nursing a childhood crush is diagnosed with polio (“I drag my wounded body / the way I will do / for the rest of my life”), and in the second, a wounded bird is rescued and given shelter (“my wild, starved, onelegged one”). In “Dharamsala,” a pilgrimage-trek draws in the Himalayan backdrop, steep climbs, and market-square stops and blends cozily with the intimacies of conjugal love. “Prey” exposes the familiar, materialistic trap of a marriage starting wrong resulting in domestic violence. Joseph uses understatement to depict the woman’s predicament rather than employ a strident, angry tone. In “Havan,” she gets more daring , getting the poem’s structure to zigzag across the page to mimic the household chase as a young bride is set on fire. On the other hand, “What Burns” could have gained from further elaboration. Less successful are her forays into Hindu mythology and her musings on goddesses, which seem to me to be assertions of female spirituality. Similarly, her attempt at creating a word-equivalent of mudras, in “The Bharat Natyam Dancer,” doesn’t entirely come off. Where Zilka Joseph excels is in her recording of family stories; the memories are photographic in their sharpness and unflinching in their revelations. She is equally adept in her handling of form to suit the needs of each poem. Altogether, a strong debut collection. Saleem Peeradina Siena Heights University Adil Jussawalla. I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky. Gurgaon, India. Hachette India. 2015. 376 pages. Having been part of the resurgence of Indian poetry in English that was very much Bombay-centered, Adil Jussawalla brought out a brilliant debut collection called Land’s End in 1962. His precursor was Nissim Ezekiel (generally acknowledged as the founding father of postindependence Indian poetry in English), who Shauna Osborn Arachnid Verve Mongrel Empire Press Drawing threads of Comanche, Spanish, and Oklahoma culture into one eclectic tapestry, Shauna Osborn delivers a spellbinding collection in Arachnid Verse. Populated with memories that are both intimate to the writer and universally applicable, Osborn grapples with issues of gender, sexuality, and identity with equal measures of humor, anger, and grit. Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry Ed. & trans. Margaret Randall Duke University Press This anthology serves as a broad, bilingual survey of Cuban poets born during the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to diversity, with women making up nearly half of the authors represented. While it’s difficult to make generalizations about style with so many on display, the sum effect is that of a time-lapse shot taken over multiple generations that shows a kind of undeniable truth about the essence of Cuban poets and their craft (see WLT...

A Theological Study of Nissim Ezekiel’s Religious Outlook

As the centuries passed by, the galaxy of Indian English Poetry become increasingly crowded. But the scenario was not like this during the early years. It is because only a few stars shine there, and Nissim Ezekiel is the pole star. His poetry contains so many aspects, themes, motives and symbols that sharpen and shape his poetic world. His poetry often shows irony, emotion, love, man-woman relationship, self- consciousness, a sense of discipline and self – criticism. He shows his concern for both modern and urban art and culture with the touch of Indian ethos and local colour. But as an Indian poet, he shows his thinking about God and religion in a vivid way. He also shows his changing view towards God and Indian theology in his poems. In this paper, I have tried to show Ezekiel’s religious outlook and aspects through some of his verses.

Re- Reading Nissim Ezekiel through the Mirror of Post-colonialism

In the genre of Indian English Poetry, Nissim Ezekiel stands as a flagship, founder and father of post-independence period. And any discussion regarding the poetic journey and development of Indian English poetry will definitely start with Nissim Ezekiel. He did the same thing what Walt Whitman did for American poetry. He is classifies both as a modernist and post modernist poet. And this can be found in the first half of his poetry. But a close looks to some of his poetry shows that his poetry manifests or reflect the gesture of post colonialism. Now-a-days cultural studies and theory of post colonialism become a fashion and also Nissim Ezekiel can be re-read by applying these cultural studies and post colonial theory to some extent. He wants to confirm his identity and also wants to hark back the colonial past of India. Not only this, he also uses myth in his poetry. This paper attempts to highlight those issues and aspects in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel where he tends towards post colonialism.

A Theological Study of Nissim Ezekiel’s Religious Outlook

As the centuries passed by, the galaxy of Indian English Poetry become increasingly crowded. But the scenario was not like this during the early years. It is because only a few stars shine there, and Nissim Ezekiel is the pole star. His poetry contains so many aspects, themes, motives and symbols that sharpen and shape his poetic world. His poetry often shows irony, emotion, love, man-woman relationship, self- consciousness, a sense of discipline and self – criticism. He shows his concern for both modern and urban art and culture with the touch of Indian ethos and local colour. But as an Indian poet, he shows his thinking about God and religion in a vivid way. He also shows his changing view towards God and Indian theology in his poems. In this paper, I have tried to show Ezekiel’s religious outlook and aspects through some of his verses.

Historical perspective of Indian Poetry in English

Historical perspective of Indian Poetry in English

Nationalism in Rabindranath Tagore Plays

History reveals that institutions or artifacts produced by human beings can lead to the exploitation or the loss of freedom of other human beings. Thus the celebration of the good life of an Athenian citizen in Plato‟s time can hide the wretchedness of vast numbers of slaves whose labor made it possible for the few free citizens to enjoy that good life. Our criteria then must apply to all, or at least the vast majority of the vast of the human group concerned, if they are to lay claim to universality. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage1 The story of Indo-Anglican literature is the story of yesterday, of a little more than a century, and today. One of the natural results of the British rule in India is the rise and development of literature. The term “Indo-Anglican” was first used in 1883 when a book published in Calcutta that bore the title Indo-Anglian Literature. After the publication of two books by Dr.K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, the term “Indo-Anglian” has not only acquired considerable currency, but also has come to stay as a familiar and accepted term applied to Indian contribution to literature in English. This has come to be known as Indo-Anglian writing and has been quite an active school of didactic and creative art for at least a century. The first theatre offering English language drama in 1776, Indian drama in English has never achieved the same status as Indian fiction and poetry in English. As in other colonies such as Canada, the Indian theatrical scene was dominated by foreign companies, touring plays drawn mainly from

A STUDY OF THE CULTURAL AMBIANCE DELINEATED IN SUNITI NAMJOSHI’S SELECT POEMS IN THE LIGHT OF HER MEDITATIVE SENSIBILITY WHICH IS GIFTED WITH IRONIC PERCEPTION

This paper takes into account the cultural ambiance against which Indian women poets have kept the feminine poetic tradition and poetic sensibility vibrant and considers Indian poetry in English by women as the daring assertion of the modern Indian woman. It analyses the cultural ambiance delineated in a few of the poet’s select poems in the light of her meditative sensibility which is gifted with ironic perception.

Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English ed. by Smita Agarwal (review)

Smita Agarwal’s edited volume of essays, Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English , is a triumphant argument for recognizing Indian poetry written in English as diverse, vibrant, and evolving. Many of the essays question previous critiques of Indian poets, question assumptions about writing in English, and offer a newer and better understanding of the divergent poetics during different periods of Indian literary history.

The Evolving Trend in Indian Poetry in English

The Evolving Trend in Indian Poetry in English

Voices Shaping Perception: On the Emergence of Modern Indian Poetry in English

Voices Shaping Perception: On the Emergence of Modern Indian Poetry in English

Exploring the Unexplored : The Love Poerty of Kamala Das

Female sexuality and the subtle femine desires has inspired the modern poet all over the world.Kamala Das , basically a confessional poet and a hard core feminist tosses the various facts of female sexuality to the domain of Post- Colonial Indian English poetry.

Jejuri: A Pilgrimage into the Past and the Present

Arun Kolhatkar’s Jejuri is probably the only book of Indian poetry in English in recent times that has some claims of be considered as a possible commonwealth classic. Though it was first published in 1954 in the Opinion Literary Quarterly, it caught the attention of the critical world only it was awarded the Commonwealth Literary Prize of 1977.It has been hailed since then as the most extraordinary book of poems. It gives us a symbolic picture of modern predicament. The subject of Kolatkar’s sequence of poems is religion, and the relation between religion and culture. Kolatkar’s attitude is very different from treatments of the same them in modern Europe and America. The difference is not ideological; it arises out of an entirely distinct climate of sensibility. Kolatkar’s poetic mind, enlivened though it may be by irony and irreverence, remains paradoxically a combination of the negatively dark and even the joyous. It represents in the final analysis a modern adjustment (present) to an accepted tradition (past). Unlike some Western work, it is not nor an attempt to construct something in a godless universe.

Slow Dance by Saleem Peeradina

these celebratelife's small beauties . Despite "mushroom clouds" and "markets where. . . cashiers overcharge /thepoor,"thepersona of "The UnnecessaryChronicle" asks,"Whoneedsa chronicle that recordsonlyfraudand pestilence / insteadof a hand reachingto grasptheextravagant day?"In "As If Submerged in Water,"thepersona "suck[s] piecesofthesummer: markets, sparrows / preening their feathers on a watermelon rind. . . such beauty,completely unnecessary to existence,/ but without which/ the worldwould be an unnecessaryplace." Milanovic's "lonelyscribe"findssolace in the Orphicmyth and thenatural cycle, where deathbrings rebirth. "Tripartition for Aleksinac" clearly enunciatesthese themes as thespeakerponderstheNATO bombing ofhisfirst home:Though "bathedin death,/ underApril plum treesin bloom, / between tulipsblown apart by the black hawks'breath," hemustrescuenot Eurydicebut his city.Finallyhe "drag[s]up thewreckofhistory," "return[s] to a faithin the halfdead ,"and"resurrect[s] thosewalls demolished by madness"as "The scattered city hashoisted itself from itssacredground, aliveagain, andit climbs/ totheheavens, towardits children, raising itself." Staircases,hills, and liminal spacespervadethesepoems,as the Orphic personatraces hisarchetypal descentand ascent.Pondering whatmightcomeif,as in Faust's augenblick, a fairmomentshould last,he realizesthat"deathitself willbeprolonged /andthat iswhy itis better, whenthehourcomes, / to push offcompletely, towards thebottom."One mustdie to be reborn. Theelevenpoemsfrom "Doors in a Meadow" recapitulate these signsand themes. As doorsopen "on a silentstaircase"that"rises towards thesky," thepersona asks, "Are we expectingsomeone to arrive, /orisitthat we'redeparting before it'stime togo?"He wonders, "Whyhave we chosento recline here,on thisthreshold, without / a church?" A tolling bell,heardin otherpoems,marks"the passing overthethreshold." In theeighth poem,notingabandonedweapons from all erasofSerbian history, the speakerreflects, "Whoneedsthem now,before thegateofdoom?"The final poem,meanwhile, "ToVerica" (Milafiovic's wife), embodiesresurrection . Thefirst lines ofitsfirst three stanzasbegin,"Before thesedoors we stand,"whileeachendsdifferently :"dear," "transparent," and "purified." Thisprogression enables theconclusion: "before thesedoors through whichonecanonlydepart / we standpureas we oncewere/ before these doorswestand ready to enter /only toleave." Despitethetragic recent history ofYugoslaviaand Serbia,thisfine collection embodies hope: "lovewill meanlove until,/ in thefreezing desert, /itquietly buildsa nestfrom which/ theworldwillbe reborn" ("SmallLampsintheDarkness"). Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University SaleemPeeradina. SlowDance.Roseville ,Michigan. Ridgeway. 2010.91 pages.$15.isbn 978-1-56439-133-7 It is uncommon fora youngpoet todebutwithan anthology ofcontemporary poetswhoarepredominantly olderand moreestablished thanhim.Yet thisis whatSaleem Peeradina,aged twenty-eight and stillunpublished, didwithhisContemporary IndianPoetry in English: An Assessment andSelection (1972). A landmark workestablishing his reputation as a rigorous critic and craftsman, itisstill widely usedand citedtoday. Fortyyears and fourpoetry books later,Peeradina'scommitmentto highstandardsof craftsmanship remains strong, ashislatest collection clearlyand consistently shows.One of thetwinpleasures and achievements of Slow Dance is the masterful arrangement of thepoemsinthree sections as well as theways they - poemsas well as sections - relateto one another and to thecomplexchoreography of thebook.The otherlies in the poemsthemselves, someofwhich areamong Peeradina's bestand,like all genuinepoetry, shouldbe read aloud in ordertobe fully enjoyed andappreciated. Of thethreesections, thefirst providesa slow and atmospheric start witha sequenceoflandscapes addressing thefundamental ambiguityanddeceptiveness ofrepresentationand its objects.The section's centerpiece maybe "Reflections on theOther/' butmostpoemsin this bookoffer perceptive interpretations of thiskeyconceptof modernity; and theydo so in moresubtleand imaginative waysthanthosereflecteduponinthis keynote poem. Themiddlesection features six "poemsbased on thefirst linesof old Hindifilm songsand ghazals." Peeradina grewup listening toand singing these tunes, andalthough he assures that "readers unfamiliar with thesongsor their conventions can readthepoemsindependent ofthat knowledge," this reader found them generally inferior totherest, andwas leftwondering whether thepoet's familiarity withhissources did not work against thenature oftheexperiment rather than initsfavor. SlowDancereaches itsquietclimax in thefinal,eponymous section ,a cadencedmeditation whose melodiceffect depends as much on theorderof thepoemsas on Peeradina'scontrolled dictionand pitch-perfect versification: "Inches from oblivion/ theheartmayyet find itsmoment /tothaw;ina split / secondflooditschambers / with blindingsight."Alternately musing and matter-of-fact, wittyand grave,blitheand bequeathing, it gathers focusand momentum as it unfolds ina Mahlerian adagiothat eventually dissolvesin "The Rite Stuff," a sensiblyfussy, touching, yettongue-in-cheek "setofinstructionsonhowto . . . proceedwitha no-fuss, no-nonsense funeral." The sad ironyof thisparting piece is manifest intheeffort toprovide an illusion ofcontrol, ifnotauthority, over something as unpredictable and ungovernable as posthumous fate: "Ifyouabsolutely cannot burn melikeautumn leavesandtwigs/ In thebackyard or on an open-air pyre onthelakefront, loadme/On a cheap2x6 plywoodpallet, drive meina pickup /Tobedropped off to a designated crematorium site." Yetinthepunch-line postscript, the readerlearnsofan alternative and potentiallynullifying document: "Just doublecheck myliving will.If itstates/ Thatmybodyshouldbe handedoverformedicalresearch, / All foregoing instructions are nulland void."(Editorial note: Two poemsbyPeeradina appeared inthe November 2009issueofWLT.) Graziano Kriitli YaleUniversity...