Description
The poems in The Inheritance of Solitude explore loss of parents, home, health and friendship, and healing after loss, reflecting on personal and collective experiences of sorrow and hope. The book is a lyrical journey, captivating in its understanding of humanity’s most challenging subject: grief. It embraces the vulnerability of love set against a redolent world of beauty and family, where we sit at the poet’s table, experiencing the intense majesty of a world filled with love, loss and finding oneself again. — Candice L Daquin, managing editor, Lit Fox Books, associate editor, Life & Legends, author, The Cruelty.
The Inheritance of Solitude is a heartfelt and radiant collection of poems exploring grief, memory, healing, and the quiet strength of love. With genuine sensitivity and honesty, Smitha Vishwanath turns personal loss into a reflection we can all relate to — on losing, remembering, and starting over. This is a moving, compassionate book that stays with you long after you finish reading. — Arindam Roy, editor-in-chief, Different Truths
The Inheritance of Solitude is a wanderer’s emotional plea, a lonely dedication to family and loss and that which remains with us long after the people we love are gone. These are poems drenched in sadness, and immensely relatable to anyone who has lost a relative of importance in their life. — Kiran Bhat, author of we of the forsaken world…
The poems in The Inheritance of Solitude have a delicate feeling and sensitivity that resonate and gently linger. As they weave a tapestry of thoughts that speak of loss and holding on, of invisible struggles that remain mostly within oneself, the poems in the volume also create a sense of community — a sense of lived experience, of emotions that are personal but reach beyond the individual self too. Written in a style that is lucid, with images that gently charm as they create a warmth, the world of the poems is one of calmness, of acceptance, of life that meanders along, in spite of everything. — Nishi Pulugurtha, academic, author, poet, translator
Smitha Vishwanath’s poems arrive almost like a whisper against the skin, and linger long after they are read. This is a book that draws us into an intimate and deeply physical relationship with the smallest presences of our lives. With remarkable tenderness and restraint, the poems move slowly, seductively, through moments that feel at once fragile and eternal. Vishwanath possesses the rare gift of making language tactile, her poems allow us to touch things without touching them, to feel the pulse of absence, longing, and wonder in ordinary existence. This collection is not merely read. It is inhabited. — Kabir Deb, writer, reviewer, translator
Smitha Vishwanath is an ex-banker who embarked on the writing journey in 2016, with a blog, smithavishwanathsblog.com. She took up writing seriously after quitting her full-time job in July 2018. In July 2019, she co-authored a book of poetry, Roads – A Journey with Verses. Her poems have found a place in several online magazines, including Thieving Magpies, The Short of It, Spillwords Press, Borderless Journal, Rebelle Society and Silverbirch Press and Rhyvers, among others. Her poem, ‘Omid’ was nominated as Best of the Net in 2021, ‘Forgotten’ was nominated during the National Poetry Writing Month in 2020 and ‘Do You Have Dreams?’ was nominated in NaPoWriMo 2021. She was awarded Reuel International Prize (II) for the poetry she wrote during NaPoWriMo, 2023. She was nominated and awarded ‘Author of the Month’ for several of her poems by Spillwords Press. The lockdown in 2020 saw her dabbling with art and trying her hand at novel writing. Coming Home is her debut novel, published in 2023, and which was awarded by the Asian Literary Society in 2024. Smitha describes herself as a poet by accident, an artist at heart, a traveller, and a lifelong learner. She currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya, with her husband. Her writing is both intensely moving and captivating in its understanding of humanity’s most challenging subject, grief.
FROM THE BOOK
Death, the Uninvited Guest
Silently, stealthily, he came.
Not a knock on the door,
not even a warning call
walked straight in —
turned a deaf ear to our pleas,
a blind eye to our tears
caught us off-guard,
left us numb.
He asked, ‘If I called would you be prepared?
When would be the perfect time to visit?
Will you ever welcome me?’
We had no answer.
My Heart Grieves
They say you’re in a better place;
I know it’s true.
They say you did not suffer;
I know it’s true.
They say it was as you wished
I know it’s true
But my heart grieves
not anymore for you.
It grieves
I’m Never Alone
Sometimes, there are two or three
who walk with me — my husband and my children
sometimes, it’s me, the trees, the flowers and the birds
and them, who left, a little too soon
to whom I talk
but I’m never alone.
