Description
Changing, Unchanging: New and Selected Poems (1995-2023) represents almost three decades of poetry. It comprises a substantial body of new work, including dramatic verse. The poems are varied: some reflect the omnipresence of technology and a social fabric that mutes individuality; others view life through a Sufi lens. Many award-winning poems and old favourites enrich this collection. Stylistic experiments abound as Anju shares her innermost musings.
View from the Web, in my opinion, is an impressive collection. The language is delicately controlled. There are few good poets writing in English in India, and not many of them are women. I would call Anju Makhija one of them: she is adventurous in her material which is varied and willing to take risks. Dom Moraes
Makhija has both the talent and will to dare. Some of her longer poems like ‘Eyes Shut, I Enter’ are a revelation, where the clutter of our lives jostles with the timeless and the fret of desire ends in the calm of acceptance. — Keki N Daruwalla
Anju’s dramatic verse is rich in verbal invention, humour and fantasy. ‘Meeting with Lord Yama’ provides a deeply allusive consideration of life after death. The lyrical cadence is unmistakable. — Gopal Lahiri
Anju Makhija’s Changing, Unchanging: New and Selected Poems, is an imagistic, hauntingly expressionistic, and a provocatively meditative polymeric oeuvre. An artistic and aesthetic achievement in contemporary Indian English poetry. — Ashwani Kumar
Makhija is above all, a seeker. We need more intrepid explorers like her who go deep into the mind, the core of the earth and return with the very Over Soul. We need poets who are unafraid to hold a mirror and speak of precarity in the age of mega-corporations, wars and sanctioned violence. — Sonya J Nair
Anju Makhija is a Sahitya Akademi award-winning poet, translator and playwright. She has an MA in Media from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of several books including Seeking the Beloved, a co-translation of the 16th century Sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif; Pickling Season; View from the Web; Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays. She has also co-edited a three-volume series of Indo-English drama and anthologies related to partition, women and children. Anju was on the English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi for five years and is the co-founder/curator of the Pondicherry-Auroville Poetry Festival.
Reviews
Debasish Lahiri in londongrip.co.uk:
Anju Makhija’s voice in Changing, Unchanging is unrelenting. It does not allow the reader an easy retreat into the haven of beautiful images. It compels them to recognize that the perception of the ‘beautiful’ is evanescent, at best, caught as it is among moments that can range from the terrible and sordid to the routine and dull. Makhija’s articulation of reality, thus, seems a little ill-at-ease: neither lost in aesthetic rapture nor bedraggled by the meanness and squalor of the world of men. Her poetry is no low-ebb retreat. Instead, it is a restless and indefatigable attempt to rock every certainty, to prove that ‘beauty’ has its foundations in the mire and muck of cities and that the sky is often reflected in puddles and ditches in the slums of Dharavi (a district of Mumbai).
Ashwani Kumar in Matchbox, an initiative by Usawa Literary Review:
Like Amrita Pritam, Anju Makhija uses “intimate afflictions” as the source of her engagement and estrangement with the language. This cathartic blending of familial and social lends fragility and child-like innocence to her craft of ‘split-second mirage, the cinematic dissolve’. Like a bee on a personal rampage through nectar, Changing, Unchanging is also about the physics of impermanence and transcendence. In physics, ‘blackhole’ is a mystical place, an enigmatic region of space-time, where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape, a self-illuminated vision that defines the universe. And that to me is at the core of Anju Makhija’s work as a poet and a feminist mystic rooted in her Sindhi identity. In a Bakhtinian sense, when you enter into her poems, you are permanently sucked into the double experience of neither death nor immortality. In this space of neither existence nor non-existence, her poems are born with her “granny’s ashes” in her words. No wonder, she invites her readers to be ‘Like a tortoise… fix your mind on me, worship me and without doubt you shall reach me”.
