Bearings

By Karthika Nair

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About the book

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.

Pages: 112

Available in:

Language: English

Karthika Nair

Karthika Nair is the author of several books, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, which won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). She has helmed the scripts of several dance productions, such as the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), Akram Khan’s dance solo.

From her liminal poems on illness to luminous ekphrastic ones on dance, Karthika Naïr is able to contain and explain the body’s pain while celebrating its sometimestranscendent liberty. - MARILYN HACKER

Bearings, similar to the first published books of other major writers, is a display of technique, preoccupations and themes. The title could refer to being, joints, posture, support, direction or revealing. Many may know the source of the author’s insights in her, unstated, daily struggle to continue an international life as poet and dance producer despite a life-threatening medical condition that needs constant attention. - BRUCE KING

Karthika Naïr’s fascination with the arts of choreographer and alchemist is very much in evidence in this strikingly assured first book, as she turns houses into actors, pigeons into thumri artists, dance into Time whirling on lone hennaed feet, pain into a pathological stalker, and death into faithful foe and lethal ally. - ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM