Description
The poems of The Garden Tantra are exuberant and beautiful, showing a direct insight into the inherent harmony of the universe. — Mani Rao
One of the twenty-first century heirs of Walt Whitman, Kolmannskog engages with passages between India and Norway, and between bodies and inner and outer worlds. — Ruth Vanita
I savoured the freshness and unforced clarity of these poems. The language is unmannered, but without resorting to a faux innocence or ersatz childlikeness. The poems celebrate, instead, the knowing that that there is life in language, that there is ‘air and rain and soil and sunshine in words’. Suffused with green light, ‘roaring dandelions’, and graced every now and then by deer with ‘tender eyes’, Vikram Kolmannskog offers us a verse garden for all seasons. — Arundhathi Subramaniam
Vikram Kolmannskog’s The Garden Tantra presents a deep searching for the speaker’s complicated selves—the written record of which is a garden of jewelled intimacies that crash on the speaker again and again. The beaks of blackbirds, mayflies, the surprise of deer, the Dark Goddess, the Dancing God, cruising in public all come together to enliven the spirit in these tender poems and the internal realisations the poet awakens to. The sensual and the spiritual spiral each one drawn by the other’s gravity. As a reader I am drawn into Kolmannskog’s meditations, wanting and ready for transformation. — Rajiv Mohabir
Vikram Kolmannskog (b 1980) is a writer, psychotherapist, and full professor of gestalt psychotherapy. He has a mixed heritage with a Norwegian father and a mother born in Kenya to Gujarati parents. He lives outside Oslo together with his husband Daniel. Among his publications are The Empty Chair: Tales from Gestalt Therapy (Routledge, 2018), Taste and See: A Queer Prayer (Mohini Books, 2018), Lord of the Senses: Stories (Team Angelica, 2019), Becoming Buddha: Meditations (Mohini Books, 2021), and Rhyheim: A Porn Poem (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). www.Vikram.no.