Pressestimmen
'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. Arundhathi Subramaniam's is a strong new voice' - Imtiaz Dharker. 'A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich' - John Burnside. 'Subramaniam's poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are the richer for it - Even more than precision, what defines her verse is its subtlety and the angle of vision from which she sees life' - Keki Daruwalla
Kurzbeschreibung
"Where I Live" combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two Indian collections of poetry, "On Cleaning Bookshelves" and "Where I Live", with a selection of new work. Her poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. They probe contradictory impulses: the desire for adventure and anchorage; expansion and containment; vulnerability and strength; freedom and belonging; withdrawal and engagement; and, an approach to language as exciting resource and desperate refuge. Her new poems are a meditation on desire - in which the sensual and sacred mingle inextricably. There is a fascination with the skins that separate self from other, self from self, thing from no-thing. These are poems of dark need, of urgency, of desire as derailment, and derailment as possibility.