Böcker av Sharmistha Mohanty

About the BookThere are things on this subcontinent-rituals, objects, gestures-that have existed for centuries but are now vulnerable, dying, at the edge of our lives. Extinctions catches them in movement, as they fade, as they set. It looks at them variously, through factual observation, or historical gaze, or a prose poem paying tribute. These are individual memories merged with the memories of a civilisation. Sometimes the two become one. The attempt is not only to look back but also to consider where we are. And so, Extinctions creates an encounter that lights up both the long enduring and the new. Following the ridge of regrets, fate, thoughts that came too late, a future appears, even of the past. Untamed, animate, time becomes many, and landscapes continue to be formed, not naming themselves yet, not conscious of being an island or a continent. On the blackened iron scales in the marketplace, a thousand years equals today.About the AuthorSharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life and Five Movements in Praise, and a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. She has also translated a selection of Tagore's fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories. Her work has been published in journals across the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, The Caravan and the Chinese Jintian. Mohanty is the founder-editor of the online literature journal Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers meet held in New Delhi.

Through these spare poems, Sharmistha Mohanty weaves together, inseparably, the contemporary and the almost primal. The result is a singular voice, new and old at the same time. In its oral quality, in its questioning and assertion, in its vigour and vulnerability, it seems to be uttering anew what was once collective, and perhaps still is, under the surface. The poems in The Gods Came Afterwards are a calling out, far beyond the personal, through an unusually pared down English language and a long Indic heritage.