Description

Who built this house?

Whose imagination

is still haunting the house

 like a chronic disease?

There’re no answers.

Only the smell of damp air

 enters the body of whoever

enters the house, sticks

to the available skin.

Bibhu Padhi awakens us with his intimate sense of belonging, of quiet comfort with the world in which he lives: “Secret presences claim our days/and our nights, reducing us to stillness/that speak of ends and retributions”. We are aware of the strong spirit—the human spirit—that hovers within every word and rhythm of Padhi’s poems. As a reader, I’ve always admired his work, the manner he responds instinctively to the right emotions and avoids the morass of sentimentality that dulls the higher planes of creativity. Bibhu Padhi’s poetry, I feel, comes from the inside of who he is as he keeps on facing himself–truly, an inner declaration of purpose of this very sensitive poet.

— Jayanta Mahapatra

Haunting, evocative, dense with images and musicality, these poems remind us of what can emerge through a poet’s vision of the world. Bibhu Padhi’s new collection treats loss and loves, frail bodies and weary shadows, with equal attention. The poems acknowledge life’s hurts—‘decades of a wound that wouldn’t close’. But, they remind us, we are not alone, but are surrounded by ‘possible friendships with things/that have been far from me’, in this beautiful world where ‘words fly like house sparrows’, and fireflies are ‘glowing messages of love’.

— Jen Webb, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Canberra

BIBHU PADHI was born and brought up in the medieval town of Cuttack on the Indian east-coast, where he studied and later, taught at Ravenshaw College, now Ravenshaw University. He presently lives in the 2,500-year-old city of Bhubaneswar, one of the oldest ‘living’ cities of India, along with Varanasi and Puri, the latter famous for the temple of Lord Jagannath and the annual Festival of Chariots or Ratha Yatra. Padhi is married to Minakshi Rath, who taught Philosophy at Ravenshaw College. They have two grown up sons—Buddhaditya and Siladitya—and a thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Tanvisha.