Description

Opening Ratnakosha, the reader is invited to lift the precious jewels of our Earth up to the light and through them, glimpse insights into a momentary or vanishing world. In this treasure box of poems, each one encrusted with spiritual gems, transitory, ephemeral beauty is crystallised in the language of timeless metaphor.  After reading, we are all the richer, our hearts more full with the wealth which is our birthright: compassion for all beings, delight in Nature’s detail, peace of mind in the wake of turmoil.

‘Quietly observant yet deeply passionate, Tansy Troy’s poetry alternates between exuberant and introspective. Whether its colours are vivid or muted, whether the moods reflect earth tones or pastels, they always paint a unique, vibrant, and moving picture.’ — Nandana Dev Sen, writer, UN ambassador and actress.

‘Tansy Troy’s words capture worlds — from a patchwork home on a hillside in Morocco, college on the Cambridge greens, rain in Rohtak, to trekking in the high Himalayas. We see a gypsy woman, we feel the fear of a cat with nine lives, we sing a lullaby to the child who mustn’t cry. With the richness of rasa in her rhyme and the incandescence of images that clamour and collide and magically coalesce to give us a kaleidoscope of a rare and reflective life. Tansy’s tremendous talent as an oral storyteller suffuses into her sonorous voice. It moves from muted murmurs to full throated cries — who am I — a person, a poet, a traveller, a trekker, wife, mother-to-be, world citizen? Where have I come from? And where is home? Always searching, with ruminations that take the reader along for the ride.’ — Sonya Dutta Choudhury, writer and journalist

‘Tansy has been blessed with the eyes of a seer. With the patience of a yogi and the compassion of an Eternal Mother, she observes “creatures great and small” and discovers that pristine drop of tear in the heart of things and nothings, beings and non-beings which is the essence of Life. Be it the elephant of a folklore, Gypsy mother in Manali, “messy nested” crow “sharp as a wound”, “architectural neck” and hard kicked “soft stomach” of Mother Ganga, “whooping and cartwheeling” family of the traffic-light gymnasts, the neem seed carelessly abandoned by the mother tree, tadpoles “breathing through tiny, gulping gills”, thirsty frog hopping restively on the stairs, lapwing’s eggs smashed by a football, the soon-to be-hunted hare wading through his green ocean, swans found dead on the banks of the Rhone, the seamstress mending “once loved cast-asides”, blackbird’s nest near a stupa or the rain dance in Rohtak — the world comes alive in her sensuous images and throbbing thought waves […] Hers is a deep intertextual dialogue with the moral geography of the land she has adopted as a surrogate mother. Especially luminous… are her version or bhashya of whatever the thunder said in the Upanishad. Her meditation on the seven rasas is equally moving. This is what happens when, led by the impulse to mother the Earth, the eternal woman in a poet swims gracefully beyond all narrow confines: “hadd chale so manva, behad chale so sadh/ had — behad dou tajai, taki mata agadh”! She is the one who would go beyond and return, return and go beyond like the primordial breath of Shakti that creates.’ —  Anamika, poet

TANSY TROY, educator and poet, playwright and performance artiste, believes it is everyone’s birthright to interpret and create.  Since graduating from King’s College Cambridge, Tansy’s journey has taken her to schools, galleries, theatres and concert halls in Europe and Asia with hand-crafted bird and animal masks and many a poetic tale up her sleeve, encouraging young people across the world to recreate their own mythos. Ratnakosha is her first formal publication of verse and represents a body of work composed and edited in India, where she lives with her family of beautiful children and many animals between Delhi, Rohtak and Manali.