Words vanish when poems transcend meaning and rise into a pure experience that is untranslatable into words. They become abstractions that create narratives of shadows and absences, leaving lingering silences behind. These are not echoes of beating a retreat. They are forest aromas, not the fragrance of roses in the garden. In
Vanishing Words
, Sukrita presents poems like the tiger's pug marks of silence! To dive into these poems may lead to the terror of loneliness of pandemic times or accord freedom of flight into the unknown. With strong underpinnings, some poems awaken one to the urgency of living fully, while other poems make one witness "Unwarranted Exit" or untimely death. Sukrita's poems in this volume present a call for an inspirational engagement with life.
Sukrita Paul Kumar,
poet, and critic, was born and brought up in Kenya. She held the prestigious Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University. Formerly a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Sukrita was an invited poet at the International Writing Programme, Iowa, USA, and Hong Kong Baptist University. Honorary faculty, Durrell Centre at Corfu, Greece, she has received many prestigious fellowships and residencies. Her recent collections of poems, amongst others, are
Country Drive, Dream Catcher,
Untitled,
and
Poems Come Home
(with Hindustani translations by Gulzar). She is the Routledge Series editor (with Chandana Dutta) of "Writer in Context" Series. Her co-edited book on the eminent writer Krishna Sobti is the first in the series. Amongst her critical books
are
Narrating Partition
Conversations on Modernism
. Her translations include
Nude,
a book of poems by Vishal Bhardwaj, and
Blind
(HarperCollins). A guest editor of journals such as
Manoa
(Hawaii) and
Muse India
, Sukrita has held exhibitions of her paintings. Many of her poems come out of her working experience with the homeless, the street children, and Tsunami victims.