Full Description
The poems of Arundhathi Subramaniam's Love Without a Story celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls 'love without a story'. Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, When God Is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Love Without a Story is her fourth collection of poetry. Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems.
Contents
7 I Grew Up in an Age of Poets
9 Deleting the Picture
12 A Theory of Wandering
14 And Where It Might End
16 Mitti
19 Finding Dad
21 The Strange Thing About Love
22 La Verna
25 A First Monsoon Again
28 How to Read Indian Myth
30 Remembering
32 Bring on the Screen Savers
34 The Fine Art of Ageing
47 Missing Friends
49 Parents
50 Parents II
51 When Landscape Becomes Woman
53 This Could Be Enough
55 Tongue
57 Let Me Be Adjective
59 Let There Be Grid
61 The Need for Nests
63 Ninda-stuti
65 Song for Catabolic Women
68 The End of the World
69 Shorthand
70 The Monk
72 The Lover
74 The Bus to Ajmer
77 In Short
78 The Problem with Windows
79 Been There
80 Backbencher
81 If It Must Be Now
82 'Dying is hard work'
83 Goddess
86 Goddess II
87 Goddess III
88 Memo
89 Memo II
90 In Praise of Conversations
93 Afterword
96 Acknowledgements
