Twilight Language

Name: Twilight Language
Price: 22.0000 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 978-988-8492-62-6

Vinita Agrawal

English , 2022/11 Proverse Hong Kong

Tags: Poetry

216 x 140 mm , 102pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-988-8492-62-6

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

VINITA AGRAWAL is an award winning poet, an editor, translator and curator of literary events, based in Indore, India. She was joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She was awarded a prize in the Proverse Poetry prize 2018 and achieved special mention in the Hawkers Prize 2019. Her poems have twice won first prize at Hour of Writes. She won the Wordweavers Poetry contest in 2014 and first prize in the Architectural Poetry Competition, 3rd Cycle – Improvisation 2021. Her work was shortlisted for the inaugural Dipankar Khiwani Memorial prize 2021.). She co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (Hawakal, 2021, 2022) and is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Vinita was featured in a documentary on twenty women poets from Asia, Deepest Uprising, directed by Huang Ming-Chuan, produced in Taiwan, and released in 2021. Agrawal is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize and on the Global Judging Panel of the SheInsprawrds. She is a keen birder and an amateur photographer.