Twilight Language
Vinita Agrawal
216 x 140 mm , 102pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-988-8492-62-6
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US$22.00
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TWILIGHT LANGUAGE is literally speaking crepuscular: looking at dimness. In these poems, language looks intentionally at the dimness of the pandemic era, the twilight faced by planet earth in the face of the raging climate crisis and the regular existential questions that seemingly are grappled with on a daily basis. Twilight language seeks also to be a conduit of hope and a better tomorrow; a visage of the poet’s experiences in the vast universe we all inhabit.
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Vinita Agrawal’s Twilight Language takes its title from sandhya-bhasha, the coded language of the spiritual questors who have traversed India’s sacred geography across the centuries, the Siddhas, the Nathas, and the Pashupatas, who have spoken of the deep interrelationships between self and cosmos, between human individual and nature’s web of being, through allusion and allegory. Traditionally, therefore, sandhya-bhasha has also been sandhi-bhasha, the language of conjuncture, of communion, of bridging.Agrawal’s pellucid, moving poems speak to both meanings of the word: they come to us at a time of gathering darkness, as our planetary future appears bleak and uncertain, placed in danger by our own delusions of species sovereignty, our brutal despoliation of the natural world, and our exploitation of our fellow sentient beings. And yet they remind us of the linkages between ourselves and animals, birds, terrain of diverse kinds, the breathing organism that is the earth. Achieving a throbbing unity of person, built form and natural environment in which division and its attendant fragmentation of consciousness ceases, Agrawal writes: “The winds turned me inside out/ I’m an ashlar floor of fallen leaves/ curling against the base of tree bark.” These finely wrought poems teach us how to redeem ourselves from isolation, through the enlargement of spirit and senses that follows, once we learn how to craft forms of solidarity with our neighbours, across classes, races, species and seasons, on this planet.
—Ranjit Hoskote, Author of Hunchprose, Poet and translator, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University.
“A beautiful achievement. Her poems speak up for humanity, turning a compassionate lyric gaze on the physical landscapes and natural history of India, but also dire social injustice, and on domestic spaces like the private room of a lost grandmother, ‘curling softly around her absence.’ Above all we meet the ‘traveller inside you’- and love: ‘A door left ajar in the winds’.”
—Ruth Padel, Author of Tigers in Red Weather Professor of Poetry King's College London
