River Wedding by Amlanjyoti Goswami (Poetrywala Publication)

9789382749|Rs. 300|Paperback

‘A new leaf turns up at your door, you flutter your wings, window a morning opening’.

About the book:

The hundred pages of this collection give scope enough to show the generosity of Amlanjyoti Goswami’s perception of the world. This is both intimate and ambitious, paying attention to the gentle nuances of family life without losing sight of the disturbing ways that history unfolds. Moments of revelatory strangeness are often entered through a child’s viewpoint – ‘sunlight talks to Zenzi…’ – but the effect never sentimental. The whole collection could be dedicated, in the delicate wording of a poem simply titled Lunch: ‘To life, more life. // The kind that, like a child, / takes in a morsel, when nobody’s looking.’ The deeper messages speak quietly, but all the more convincingly for that, and the points of arrival are not grand visions but ‘a fine ordinariness’. What renders this quality fine is Goswami’s sure and economical way with language – ‘we wear the dusk of sorry news’, or the blind flautist’s sensation of ‘the grain in the wood, the press and leave / of my fingers’. There is no postcolonial uncertainty in this marrying of Indian perspectives and the English language, whose literary heritage is graciously acknowledged, with nods to Soyinka and Achebe, to Walcott and even (with a healthily wry smile) to Matthew Arnold when he turns up in a second-hand bookstall in Chandni Chowk. Rather, there is a generous welcome to the world – with the freshness of an outsider’s view sometimes, but always with a sense of hospitality (Philip Gross).

Excerpt:

Meanwhile, we wait

For fresh orders and crowded afternoons,

We wear the dusk of sorry news –

Gunfire in other streets, other cities.

We pray,

in the silence of our kitchens, simmering,

that nothing must take us down,

nothing that greed ever blessed.

We pray,

None of that will ever reach us –

this sanctuary, this shuttle of weaves,

this breeze…

(from ‘Bethnal Green’)

About the poet: Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poems have been published in India, Nepal, Hong Kong, the UK, USA, South Africa, Kenya and Germany, including the anthologies, ‘40 under 40: An Anthology of Post Globalisation Poetry (Poetrywala) and A Change of Climate (Manchester Metropolitan University, Environmental Justice Foundation and the University of Edinburgh). His poems have also appeared on street walls of Christchurch, exhibitions in Johannesburg and buses in Philadelphia. He studied at the Universities of Delhi and Harvard. He grew up in Guwahati, Assam and lives in Delhi.

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