Under the PoeTree – Every Branch Has Something for Everyone!

For some poetry is salvation, for some it can be a lullaby.

Now is a great time to venture into the world of poetry. Explore the power of words, how they add rhythm to everyday life through simplicity in a few lines. From humourous anecdotes to soulful insights, the Harper10 is the perfect way to explore poetry in a new light.

So start with one or maybe get the whole set so that there’s no dearth of poetry during this lockdown!

1. Countries of the Body – Tishani Doshi 

‘There is magic in her poems.’ – U. R. Ananthamurthy. First published in 2006, Tishani Doshi’s debut collection, Countries of the Body, marks the arrival of a major new voice in international poetry. It won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection. Each poem in this collection sings of the body with all its contours and contradictions. Republished in this very special edition, the poems will enchant readers old and new with their delicate and haunting quality. Get the e-book.

2. When God is a Traveller- Arundhati Subramanium 

Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems explore ambivalences – the desire for adventure and anchorage, expansion and containment, vulnerability and strength, freedom and belonging, withdrawal and engagement, language as exciting resource and as desperate refuge. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, and all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize, When God Is a Traveller is a remarkable book of poetry. Get the e-book.

3. Triage: Casulaties of Love and Sex – Margaret Mascarenhas 

‘Savage. Searing. Compelling. Images and words that are like ice picks piercing the heart. Mascarenhas dazzles … and hurts.’ – Shobhaa De ‘Give me bread and poetry, and make the poetry the rich, sensual, kingfisher-coloured poems that make up Margaret Mascarenhas’ Triage. A wickedly intelligent, major voice in Indian writing, Mascarenhas will remind you that poems are as essential, and as satisfying, as fresh-baked bread.’ – Nilanjana Roy Get the e-book.

4. Space Gulliver: Chronicales of an Alien – Sampurna Chattarji 

Boldly playful, ingenious, associative and mercurial, Sampurna Chattarji’s new poems careen through varied terrain, geographic and linguistic, in a dizzy journey of defamiliarization, as the alien protagonist, Space Gulliver, extends and challenges habitual ideas of what constitutes the mundane. In the process, she proceeds to recover for herself the sense of ‘first-time-ness’, the art of being ‘vulnerable to every body that rests against mine, vulnerable to the word “eagle”, the idea of the scar that the knife has left around the heart’. She also recovers the art of living on the edge – ‘a good place to sit when you wish/ to regard the world you had insanely loved/ and now feel only a puzzled affection for’. Here is a book that blends intellectual enquiry, a taste for whimsy and a love of language into challenging and audacious poetry. – Arundhathi Subramaniam. Get the e-book.

5. Malabar Mind – Anita Nair

In Malabar Mind, Anita Nair’s debut collection of poems, the real and corporeal, landscapes and mindscapes are explored with a fluid ease. From the quirky resonance of Malabar’s names to the stressed drone of television newscasters during war time; from the apathy of non-stick frying pans to the quiet content of cows chewing cud, Anita Nair rakes through the everyday, pausing each time for an unusual moment. Love, failure, humor, irony, lust, hope, anguish; beaches, crows, bus journeys, hospitals, just about every aspect of the human existence finds place in this collection of poems written over a decade. Get the e-book.

6. Life and Times of Mr S – Vivek Narayan 

Life and Times of Mr S worked for me like magic. It unsettled my notion of what was real, what possible, and resettled that notion in a strange luminous place. Narayanan uses what he sees as singular illusions – class, caste, family, for example – to conjure a ‘pluriverse’ of his own, crowded with multiple, often polymorphous identities that, by their very nature, could be illusions too. This recalls the work (and play) of magician-acrobats and Narayanan is one of them. Questioning the very nature of reality and the possibility of finding true answers, he pushes at limits, walking a dangerous tightrope. I am dazzled by his dexterity. – Adil Jussawalla. Get the e-book. 

7. He is Honey, Salty and the Most Perfect Grammar – Kala Krishnan Ramesh 

Murugan – the younger son of Shiva and Parvathy, the younger brother of Ganesha – is a tricky and temperamental god, but he is beloved of the poets. Fittingly then, Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s contemporary bhakti poems in He Is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar speak in the voices of many poets. We don’t always know who they are, but as the poems unfold, one voice emerges above those of the rest. She is the god’s favourite poet, a woman whose whole life revolves around him. Get the e-book.

8. Bearings – Karthika Nair 

In the words of the poet herself, ‘Bearings began as the only tangible signs of an attempt to stay connected to a language that felt most intimately my own, and yet did not figure in my landscape any more.’ Through its three sections, Virga, Damaged Goods and Terra Infirma, Karthika Nair meditates on the intertwined themes of directions, moorings and disclosures, with the multiple meanings and connections inherent in the title itself. Bereavement and absences, the loss of memory and love, concerns about home and identity, find eloquent expression in these evocative poems which the poet likens to a logbook of journeys without any particular destination in mind, with language as shape-shifting map, and the desire to express, to share as the sole, somewhat unreliable, compass. This is Karthika Nair’s debut collection. Get the e-book.

9. All One’s Blue – Kazim Ali 

All One’s Blues collects early, new and unpublished poems by Kazim Ali. The range of poetry readers will encounter in the book is breathtaking: the poet gives voice to Miriam, the older sister of Moses, writes letters to Rumi, confronts avalanches, inhabits Icarus’s falling body, laments the imprisonment of poets. Drawing from the tradition of Persian poetry and attuned to the turns of the ever-evolving English language, moving between prayers and confessions, these poems challenge and expand the scope of the lyric and the metaphysical. Get the e-book.

10. 3 Sections – Vijay Seshadri 

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri’s is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life – a wayward history, an indeterminate future and a present condition of wanting to out-think time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of the most important poets of our time. Get the e-book.