Rebought Facsimiles – Nandini Dhar

Description

Featuring artworks by Indira Halder

Including a long essay, ‘Here, I Explain My Own Poems’

Nandini Dhar’s is a voice so sharp that it pierces through the cacophony of violence, city sounds, shrieks of birds, trees, and babies alike. She is a flaneur and a photographer of corners of houses no one wants to visit, of the parts of the city everyone wants forgotten. This collection is a cartographer’s work of mapping a history that won’t make it to textbooks. In this extraordinary collection of poems, lies a remarkable voice that won’t be denied. — MANJIRI INDURKAR

These are city poems: not poems about the city but poems that make and remake the city through the materiality of language, while the city evades and resists. Dhar seeks to smash open the city’s myriad elements and “rhyme them back again”, but “the city / loves to pound all end-rhymes / into porcelain-dust”. The poem-city constituted in this tension is always on edge because the language is a foreign one, implicated in violence: “this iamb is an indigo-planter’s whip on my tongue”. Thanks to Dhar’s mastery of her craft, walking this unstable city is a powerful experience: on every street, the reader is immersed in a music rich with assonance, consonance, dissonance; lines that are dense, yet cascading; images at once striking and unsettling. The effect is exhilarating. — ARUN SAGAR

NANDINI DHAR is a bilingual poet who writes in English and her native language Bangla. She is the author of the book Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2017) and the chapbook Occupying the Tongue (Aainanagar Prakashani, 2017). She has also written four full-length collections of poems in Bangla.