The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry

Title: The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Author: Ed By Lakshmi Holmstrom Edited By Subashree Krishnaswamy
ISBN: 9780670082810
Binding: Hard back
Publisher: Penguin/Wiking
Number of Pages: 260
Price: INR 499/-

The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world.

The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.

Doveglion:Collected poems by Jose Garcia Villa

Title: Doveglion:Collected poems
Author: Jose Garcia Villa
ISBN:9780143105350
Binding: paper back
Date: 2008
Publisher: penguin classics
Number of Pages: 260
Price: $ 11.00

Known as the “Pope of Greenwich Village,” José Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940s New York that included W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name—for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.

The Dream of a Common Language - Poems 1974–1977

Title: The Dream of a Common Language
Author: Adrienne Rich
ISBN: 0-393-31033-7
Binding: Paper
Publisher: WW Norton and Company
Number of Pages: 77
Price: $10.95

"Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief, and it is a measure of her success as a poet that most of the time they get it. . . . The affirmation and the occasional moments of pure joy in these poems are quiet but fully earned."—Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

"Adrienne Rich's new poems are important because they come so close to achieving the dream they're all at least partly about. The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman's heart and mind in language for everybody—language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this."—Boston Evening Globe

Your Native Land, Your Life - Adrienne Rich

Title: Your Native Land, Your Life
Author: Adrienne Rich
ISBN: 0-393-31082-5
Binding: Paper

Publisher: WW Norton
Number of Pages: 113
Price: $ 8.95

A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems. The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory "Sources" and "Contradictions—Tracking Poems," an ongoing index of an American woman's life.

The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."

50 Drawings to Murder Magic- Antonin Artaud

Title: 50 Drawings to Murder Magic
Author: Antonin Artaud
ISBN: 978-1905422661
Binding: Hard bound

Date: 2008
Publisher: Seagull Books
Number of Pages: 82
Price: INR 950/-

For the poet, theorist, philosopher, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud, magic was always a central concept and positive force, capable of healing the rift between words and things, culture and life. But during his nine years of incarceration in mental asylums, magic seemed to lose its illuminating transformative power and to become demonic and persecutory. Artaud entered the realm of spectres and vampires which he believed were sucking the vitality from his mind and body. Artaud later filled twelve little exercise books with an account of his struggles to escape this physical, psychological and artistic hell. The first eleven books are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches of totemic figures, pierced bodies and enigmatic machines. Two months before his death, he took a twelfth exercise book and wrote a remarkable, incantatory text, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. It was the last thing he wrote.

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004- Adrienne Rich

Title: The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004
Author: Adrienne Rich
ISBN 10: 0393327558ISBN-13: 978-0393327557
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Number of Pages: 113
Price: $13.95

What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics,

Title: What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics,
Author: Adrienne Rich
ISBN 10: 0393312461ISBN-13: 978-0393312461
Binding: Paper
Date: 2003
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Number of Pages: 321
Price: $12.95

Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and Other Poems Cesar Vallejo

Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and Other Poems Cesar Vallejo - Author Margaret Sayers Peden - Translator Ilan Stavans - Introduction by

Book: Paperback 5.07 x 7.79in 352 pages ISBN 9780143105305 25 Mar 2008 Penguin Classic Adult

Price: Rs 775/-

A major new bilingual edition of the Peruvian poet’s work
Cesar Vallejo is one of the best-known Latin American poets of the twentieth century. Challenging, intense, and difficult to translate, Vallejo’s work has often been overshadowed by his fervent endorsement of communism. Noted scholar Ilan Stavans tackles the avant-garde poet’s politics head-on in an enlightening new introduction that places Vallejo in his proper literary context, while Margaret Sayers Peden’s new translation does full justice to Vallejo’s complex literary style. Including Spanish and English versions of more than eighty poems that span the arc of his career, this volume is certain to become the leading collection of Vallejo’s work for years to come.