This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet's trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and languages of the USA and then Europe. Urgent, compassionate and inventive, Bhatt's work forms a uniquely sustained project of reinvention and rediscovery.
Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published seven collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, Brunizem (1988). Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (PBS Recommendation, 1991), The Stinking Rose (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (PBS Recommendation, 2000), A Colour for Solitude (2002), and Pure Lizard (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 2008). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991, the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000, and the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London and at the Heinrich Boll Cottage on Achill Island, Ireland. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She divides her time between Germany and elsewhere.
Title: Collected Poems
Author: Bhatt, Sujata
ISBN: 9781857549973
Binding:
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: 2013-09-26
Number of Pages: 320
Weight:
'Here is a chance to see Sujata Bhatt's favourite themes strengthened by re-gathering. A common theme is language, the very stuff of poetry, given special insight by her travels and her multilingual experience. In India, she says, it is 'a sin to be rude to a book'; 'The Stare' considers two babies, human and monkey, gazing at each other curiously, one with language, the other with... who knows? Elsewhere she considers the loss of her mother tongue, 'dead' in her mouth but returning to her in dreams. A broad-minded, humane, imaginative book.' --Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales 'Sujata Bhatt leads the reader through the bright, familiar world and on into the dark until her words pierce that darkness, offering a light that will challenge and reward. Here are poems that move confidently through that dangerous border-world between the real and the surreal, illuminating both. This book is a treasure-house of modern, magical poems.' --John F. Deane
