In the Light of Shiva (selected poems ) – HS Shivprakash

Description

Published with a grant from The Raza Foundation, New Delhi HS Shivaprakash represents the clearest voice of humanity at a time and context when humanity is steeped in incomprehensible levels of growth and conflict. His poetry exemplifies the finest paths available to find solace: empathy, compassion, query, remembrances, community, reflection, wonder… In the Light of Shiva brings together the best of Shivaprakash’s previously published and unpublished poems; further, a few poems translated by Manu Devadevan and Kamalakar Bhat are appended at the end. The volume includes three prose texts that will help the readers better comprehend the contexts of HS Shivaprakash’s poems: a scholarly introduction by eminent literary critic Rajendra Chenni, a detailed interview with him on his views on the craft and a comprehensive analysis of his poems by S Siraj Ahmed. Shivaprakash is a visionary poet, not in the sense that a religious mind would interpret it, but in the way that poetry captures reality metaphorically to give it a new sense and presence in favour of the human condition, something that seems to be always at the forefront of the poet’s intentions. The gods and heroes of the religious world, the sacred loci of the mental consciousness of each individual or community or humanity as a whole, the travels that take him from one place to the next (a rock garden, the ruins of Tusculum, a balcony of an old house in Rocca Priora, to name just three instances of the poet’s stance to give new sense and purpose to every single situation he presents in each poem) are not just focus of his sensibilities but tropes of his exploration of the culturally vast syncretism that characterises his writing. — Rei Berroa Shivaprakash has been writing for over four decades now. The recent edition of his collected poems in the original Kannada runs into seven hundred pages. To have written so consistently well, to have broken new ground in the art of poetry, and to have shown new paths for exploration to the younger generation of poets is no small achievement. Just as so many worlds have entered his poetry, let these translations knock lightly on the doors of many languages and enter like long-forgotten friends. — Rajendra Chenni