Modern Literature

  Between them only a desk. Carlisle stood behind it. Felix stood before it. For several blinks of the wall clock Carlisle had remained sitting. It became necessary now for her to stand. "And what did you call it exactly?" Felix posed, pronged by a wariness, his withdrawn Honduran accent simultaneously deferential and steeled. "Does it matter?" "It's unusual. That's all. I was...

  Review by Anjana Basu Despite the Machine Guns The warped image of a kingfisher in the water - at least it is a bird, at least there is water. Keki Daruwalla once confessed that in these times only politics can force him into poetry. In 2014, he gave up his Sahitya Akademi award(1) as a protest against right wing fundamentalism that...

  In his poem Can Palat W.S. Merwin reminisces about an abandoned, hillside farmstead he encountered as a young man. On a terrace he finds an ancient pomegranate tree gnarled and twisted and the bark shredded the rings inside it holding its story and the sap still climbing to make another life…1 Taking particular note of the tree rings and their circularity, what grasps...

Review by: Rajesh Subramanian The poems in this collection are refreshingly different - in terms of their style, content and poetic poignancy. You catch hold of your pet cat and try to contain it between your hands - it defies the attempt at containing it and jumps off your hands with a vengeance. These poems are no different. They portend...

 We Risk TakersIt's snowing in the city.I dig your car outso you can risk your lifeon pot-holed black-ice roads. You're on your wayto making sureyou don't get chargedone of your few vacation days. I stay behind with a book,a light at my elbow,a pane of glasscracking with flakes. From time to time,1 pray under my breathyou make it whereyou're going safely. But there's...

 PlaceIf you walk the streets of the citythat I write about,you would call me a liar.The broken wall,no more a playground ingressor a sunset bench.A new coat gobbles the graffiti,an extinct backdrop for the urban day.The pothole,an elusive rabbit that pops its headfrom a new substrate of the burrow.At the bookstore,a hot new bestseller takes centrestage;yesteryear stars resigned to...

 By Rajesh Subramanian  Evil has been an inescapable part of the human environment since time immemorial. Whether it originates from the Satan or otherwise, its tentacles have held humanity in a tight grip and there seems to be no way out. Men of letters, especially poets have always raised their alarm about this problem and philosophers have spent countless nights...

  Translated by DanijelaTrajkovic   Sleep Condition shadows of what has been done did not disappear think with your heart religion is not based on evidence but on checking there on the same branch oblivion is hanged the fruit is magic the entrance of the gods kidnapped from human voice Cioran claims that life does not exist that death is a state of sleepMezra1 the Vampire He came to throw on us the drop of blood he will be born of There is an insect...

  Heb-do look onward on homing gulls,guns arriving in somnolence.your poet mourns his twin tower ebb,while wordsmiths mash six adverbs a breath.with tepid rafts one sees the shore,moving farther, a third eyebrow. garbage rusts in cans of pallid hues,reflecting off a new dengue flu.curved balls pitch melancholy rain,boxed out soap cards, cartoon caprices.Paris again. Lunatics fringe mainstream chat showswords get thrown in gourmet-harassment,...

 By Anjana Basu  Mountains of Silence Ruskin Bond’s poetry, like his prose is without pretentions. His verses are rhymed in some cases, not in some and have a Wordsworthian perspective on life. He writes about the hills, the rain, flowers, grass crushed between a lover’s thighs and other such country matters. There are meditations on snails and birds, small creatures who...