The Alchemy of Nine Smiles – Yuyustu Sharma

“World renowned Himalayan poet.” — The Guardian “He is a United Nation of poetry with absolute integrity and honesty, a great poet WH Auden and William Carlos Williams would applaud.” — Stanley Moss The poems here weave an epic narrative of the poet’s travels across continents, displaying a wide range of experiences replete with indigenous myths and legends and surreal narratives evoking agony of innocent lives torn apart by natural disasters and inhumanity of a corrupt polity. They range from his early struggle to survive as a full-time poet in the sweltering alleys of Delhi and remote Himalayan canyons to his inexorable ramblings across continents to sing songs of the innate spirituality of the high hills and humanity of the people he meets. Bold and kaleidoscopic, solemn and joyful, the poems show a grand poet at work, constructing a blazing narrative of our contemporary times. From seven epigrammatic constructs that caused the earthquakes in the Himalayas to his meditations on his beloved lake Fewa and on the Atlantic shore, the poems delve deeper into the intricacies of his travels and elements that keep a traveler alive in forlorn lands. Later poems move on to the agony of extinguished hearths, sectarian violence and innocent lives caught up in the crossfire of South Asian geopolitics. An epiphany from his childhood where a black bird came to hit his grandma’s cagey chest brings the readers to the final sequence of the nine smiles where the poet uses shamanic ecstasy and trance to bring his late mother back to life, the one who waited for his arrival in his hometown in Punjab, leading us to linger in the poet’s magical world for a very, very long time.