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    When God Is a Traveller
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    When God Is a Traveller
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    When God Is a Traveller
    Ebook73 pages27 minutes

    When God Is a Traveller

    By Arundhathi Subramaniam

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize Poetry Book Society Choice These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness - all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes. These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politi of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. When God is a Traveller is her fourth collection of poetry. 'A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich' A remarkable book from a remarkable poet' - John Burnside. 'This is writing that creeps up on the reader quietly, sometimes with just the whisper of a sari, or the taste of a lullaby, and yet spins suddenly on the edge of stark recognition' - Imtiaz Dharker. '...one of the finest poets writing in India today' It is not dulcet music you hear in Where I Live. It's the swish of swordplay, each poem skewered at sabre-point and then placed on an electric grille to sizzle like a rasher on a barbecue' - Keki Daruwalla, The Hindu. '...a strong personality and an individual voice; her poems feel as if they are meant to be read aloud as well as on the page.... Subramaniam is becoming a major poet.' - Bruce King, Journal of Postcolonial Literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateOct 30, 2014
    ISBN9781780372259
    Unavailable
    When God Is a Traveller
    Author

    Arundhathi Subramaniam

    Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize, she mostly lives in Bombay (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving). She has published two books of poetry in Britain with Bloodaxe, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with new work, and When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and was awarded the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy. Her latest collection, Love Without a Story, is due from Bloodaxe in 2020. She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011) and Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (2014). In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at London’s Southbank Centre in January 2015.

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