Description
Introduced by Cyrus Cassells, the Poet Laureate of Texas
Reading Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s romantic verses and empathetic travel poems brought to mind the roving priest-poets of traditional Japanese literature, particularly Kobayashi Issa’s famous three-line jewel:
The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.
Such a work of gentle humour and revelatory gesture encourages wonder and delight in the unexpected encounters of the day: suddenly we’re in the mind of a traveller pausing to ask directions and receiving instructions from a Samaritan farmer —in a lively, swiftly accessible duet of rootedness and uprootedness. Many of the often eyewitness poems in this eclectic volume have a similar capacity to invoke a scene, situation, or person with remarkable concision and artful juxtaposition, inviting us to enter the landscape and become co-travellers and co-dreamers with the poet in picturing the vivid world of the poem:
Time will be when he wakes up,
a Rip Van Winkle,
his children, all grown, standing before him
with their sticks of fire,
and he will look around delirious,
hearing the voice of the maid of the mist
whispering him into another dawn.
— ‘Old Man Asleep by the Niagara Falls’
Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s poetry appears in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Bloodaxe), Talk of the Town (Penguin) Lie of the Land (Sahitya Akademi), Yearbook of Indian Poetry, among others. His poetry has won national and international poetry prizes, such as All India Poetry Prize, Wingword Poetry Award, Chandigarh Literary Festival Prize, and has appeared in leading poetry journals in In-dia, and abroad. He had an MFA (Poetry) stint in the Southwest Texas State University, US. His Poem sequence ‘Father, Wake Us in Passing, was nominated by ICCR for the Foreign Poets Seminar, Tagore Centre Reading, Berlin, Germany. The poem won a Poetry Residency at Augsburg University and was translated into German. This Small Town and A Land in the Sun are his forthcoming collections. His novel Basundhara is soon forthcoming. His works include plays on the final days of John Keats, the lives of poet Subramania Bharati, and Saint Devasahayam. His novel A Bridge Over Karma is being reissued as Karma River in Malayalam. His translations into English include Poonthanam’s Jnanappana and Changampuzha’s Ramanan (Kerala Sahitya Akademi). He founded the little magazine for English poetry, Poetry Chain. His new work includes Living Poetry series Seven Contemporary Poets from Kerala, and What Else Is Rain, An Anthology of English Poetry from Kerala. He lives in Trivandrum, Kerala.
https://gopikottoor.blogspot.com