Description
These sparse and reflective poems carry depths of meaning and the lilt of orality — a luminous collection. — Namita Gokhale
As long as you keep/ your sculpture dancing/ you can keep it from falling apart. Madhu’s poems are strange comments on life as he sees it, the past as he sees it, synchronicity and serendipity that lies around us. Poems worth diving into. — Mallika Sarabhai
Madhu Raghavendra’s Seeking the Infinite is a tender meditation on his myriad world. Devotion and longing persist in these contemporary landscapes and experiences, where bhakti traditions emerge in unexpected places — from pallanguzhi games to coal clouds to flower stalls. … Here is work that understands how spiritual yearning dwells in both temple and landfill, camphor and ‘soaking words’, encouraging us to linger with Raghavendra’s searching poems of gentle and alert revelation. — Gemma Robinson
The poems in this collection are moments of dhyana or meditation, conversations with my myriad interpretations of Shiva. These are contemporary bhakti poems where I bow in spirituality, yearn for the divine, weave the thread of interspersed mindfulness through work, people, art, and artists across the world. The sense of reflection in the poems, with evident undertones of playfulness, everydayness, questions, trepidation, and longing, bring them closer to the sākhyatva (friendship with the divine) and ātma-nivedana (self-surrender to the divine), a kind of bhakti, if at all one needs to classify. The poems dwell in a space which suggest that divinity can be accessed through remembrance during the daily course of our lives. In these poems, it happens while engaging with visual art or watching a performance or walking down the road or picking up groceries or dabbling between slide decks and worksheets, reminding the permanence of infinity and the transitoriness of our bodily self. Some of the poems were written during my time as poet-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland as a part of the Charles Wallace Fellowship. A few of them were written at the first edition of the Ajanta Ellora Arts Residency inspired by The Kailasa Temple (Cave 16) at Ellora Caves.
Madhu Raghavendra is a poet, artist, and curator, who has authored four books of poetry, Make Me Some Love to Eat, Stick No Bills, Being Non-essential, and Going Home. He was a poet-in-residence at the International Writing Program Fellowship, University of Iowa, and the Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship, University of Stirling. He collaborates with global artists to create cross-disciplinary poetry experiences, and his poems have been set to classical music and contemporary dance in the United States, Finland, and the Netherlands. He conducts poetry workshops for young adults, and uses poetry as a tool in development conversations. He participated in PEN Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers at the United Nations Headquarters, New York in 2022. He curates the multidisciplinary Ajanta Ellora Arts Residency.
