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”.
Kabir Deb in Outlook India
There are poets who speak about poverty from air-conditioned rooms. It is not bad in a democracy but it can be toxic when poetry becomes a rant. Bombay/Mumbai grows in Anju Makhija’s poetry. It does not have a single identity and dwells in the grey. The binary construct of any city can be an easy cup of tea, but like tea depends on the leaves that have been crushed for it to reach our lips, cities offer us certain raw components. They can be made of flesh and bones. Or they are made of permanent landscapes. Makhija writes about both to keep the city alive and desirable for the readers. … Similarly, the language of a poem decides its reach. It is like the steel of a knife. One can either feel the chilling surface or the pain when it pierces through our tissues. The poet’s language provides us a visual, a necessary idea and a chunk of her heart through her verses. They can touch us only when in times of comfort. Makhija’s poetry is not directed to ruffle our basic contentment. … The collection is divided into three parts to give us an idea of the poet’s evolution and the versions which stayed as permanent companions. In the first part, we get to read her recent poems where the poems are a little calm, not confounded by morbidity and takes the bigger picture into concern. … Changing, Unchanging is a necessary collection of poems to understand how a human being grows with a new perspective towards life, death and everything beyond them. The ferocity gets calm; the bare seduction is toned down by the experience; the knife metamorphoses into a spoon. The poet wants us to look what the spoon is holding and to do it, our hands should proceed towards the steel. Our body should walk towards it and the tongue has to leave its warmth on its body.
Shabnam Mirchandani in Bangalore Review
Extra-linguistic resonances fly like sparks out of Anju Makhija’s recently published collection of poems. These inflamed vibrations bring their fire to the wandering quest of a poet who has brought existential torments to the page, the stage, and the discursive spaces where minds congregate to find meaning within emptiness, rupture, and unfulfilled longings. Her poems burrow deep into the heart of embattled endeavors to simply exist and express oneself in a world where receptivity is an increasingly rare phenomenon.
