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Snehal Vadher reviews Five Movements in Praise By Sharmistha Mohanty     “The land rises and falls, a geological breath.” So begins Sharmistha Mohanty’s new book, and from that moment on, the language remains acutely perceptive to time embedded in our experience of the world. Five Movements in Praise is Mohanty’s third book of fiction, in which she continues on the journey begun in her first book, Book One , an exploration of storytelling itself through fragmented narratives. Although this phrase suggests postmodernist tendencies, the values and aesthetics of Mohanty’s work are far from those observed in works classified under that label. For one, we see her trying to form continuities out of the disjointed and disparate pasts, rather than play with them through pastiche. A relentless force is at work in Mohanty’s prose to bring closer, to buttress, times and spaces far from one another. So the story of Manaku, a Pahari painter living in the early 1700...

POET-CRITIC SNEHAL VADHER WEIGHS IN ON The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry   edited by Sudeep Sen This anthology is a welcome addition to a line of anthologies that have been challenging and expanding ideas about Indian English Writing. This trend begins with A. K. Mehrotra ’s illustrious The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets , published in 1992, a book that served as a textbook for a generation of poets and helped establish Nizzim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawala and A. K. Ramanujan as the first truly modern Indian poets in their engagement with present realities in and through the medium of English.   Then in 1994 came Ramanujan’s and Dharwadker’s The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry , opening inner borders and familiarising English readers with poetry written in several of India’s regional languages. More recently, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets , edited by Jeet Thayil and published in 2006, is n...

Snehal Vadher reviews Life and Times of Mr S   by Vivek Narayanan   In Life and Times of Mr S , Narayanan’s second collection of poems, at least two features of his work become established. The first is Narayanan’s deft style in which lived experience is rendered through a densely sensuous and abstract language. This feature reaches an apogee in the scintillating last poem, ‘That Touch Otherworldly…,’ where he writes, “and I swam/ swam in every direction burned/ in pinpricks/ wrung hollow by the night/ and I was one among the ants/ signalling to them/ and even the light green of/ my shirt hurt me…,” (re-)creating the experience of feeling an unborn baby’s kick from outside The second feature of Narayanan’s work is the relentless reworking of fixed forms, as was amply evident in his first collection, Universal Beach , where he explored the idea of a sonnet of variable line length. This trait becomes more involuted in Life and Times...