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; 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.
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.
‘…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.
Cover painting: Three Dancers and a Goat (2002) by Selina Trieff
OIL ON CANVAS, 72" x 67"
PRIVATE COLLECTION, COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY, PROVINCETOWN, MA