Description
World renowned Himalayan poet. — The Guardian
He is a United Nation of poetry with absolute integrity and honesty, a great poet WH Auden and William Carlos Williams would applaud. — Stanley Moss
The poems here weave an epic narrative of the poet’s travels across continents, displaying a wide range of experiences replete with indigenous myths and legends and surreal narratives evoking the agony of innocent lives torn apart by natural disasters and the inhumanity of a corrupt polity. They range from his early struggle to survive as a full-time poet in the sweltering alleys of Delhi and remote Himalayan canyons to his inexorable ramblings across continents to sing songs of the innate spirituality of the high hills and humanity of the people he meets. Bold and kaleidoscopic, solemn and joyful, the poems show a grand poet at work, constructing a blazing narrative of our contemporary times. From seven epigrammatic constructs that caused the earthquakes in the Himalayas to his meditations on his beloved Lake Fewa and the Atlantic shore, the poems delve deeper into the intricacies of his travels and elements that keep a traveller alive in forlorn lands. Later poems move on to the agony of extinguished hearths, sectarian violence and innocent lives caught up in the crossfire of South Asian geopolitics. An epiphany from his childhood where a blackbird came to hit his grandma’s cagey chest brings the readers to the final sequence of the nine smiles where the poet uses shamanic ecstasy and trance to bring his late mother back to life, the one who waited for his arrival in his hometown in Punjab, leading us to linger in the poet’s magical world for a very, very long time.
Called “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Michael Graves, Brand Called You), Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. Author of eleven poetry collections, including, Lost Horoscope & New Poems, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe, but when he is back home, he goes trekking in the Himalayas. Currently, Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
www.yuyutsusharma.com