Product Description
The work is a joy to read. What worked was precisely the way the poet kept working the line and the voice, so that with each poem new resources emerged. Something quite remarkable starts to happen, so that by the end the reader is fully enfolded in Space Gullivers world. -- DAVID HERD In Space Gulliver, Sampurna Chattarji chronicles not only the journey of its alien protagonist, but also how one wor(l)d changes into another through cerebral associations. As Space Gulliver careens through various time-frames and tries to take stock of earthly and unearthly objects, the cathedral that is the sky changes its form continually, at times disappearing altogether. The nature of poetry in this collection too is in contrast flux and full of fury, absorbing eclectic modes and moods, which may come from the protagonists encounters with poets, travelling centaurs, a manual for Tibetan grammar and a Dalmatian. A fantastically engineered sequence, here is poetry that is not afraid to be whimsical and astute at the same time so that in the end, like Space Gulliver, the readers too will be no longer terrified of vastness.
About the Author
Sampurna Chattarjis sixteen books include a short-story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love; a translation of Joy Goswamis Selected Poems; and seven poetry titles, the most recent being Elsewhere Where Else / Lle Arall Ble Arall, co-authored with Eurig Salisbury; and Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris, written in collaboration with Karthika Naïr. She is currently Poetry Editor of The Indian Quarterly.