This Water: (World Poet Series)

About the Book

Gagan Gill is one of the most respected poets writing in Hindi today. Her poems give voice to the unheard – whether of a foetus or a bride, the abused earth or the animals upon it. This selection, featuring work from each of her five collections, demonstrates the musical and visual originality of her verse, which is constantly finding new expressive possibilities in simple everyday language. Includes an afterword by Helen Charman.

"[Gagan Gill] combines stark images with rare expressiveness: expressiveness composed of silences, gaps, absences, disruptions, of pulsational pressure which goes beyond language."
-Lucy Rosenstein

About the Author :
Gagan Gill was born in 1959 in Delhi. She had an extremely successful career as a journalist but chose to sacrifice the journalist for the poet in her in order to secure the 'long periods of silence in her everyday life' which she considered necessary to remain 'truly connected to words'. Gagan has published four collections of poetry and one volume of prose: her first collection Ek din lautegi larki (One day the girl will return) focuses on the gamut of female experience (but also includes epigrams and verses about political events); the poems of Andhere me Buddha (Buddhas in the dark) are variations on the theme of sorrow in human existence; her third volume Yah akanksha samay nahin (Inopportune desire) is dedicated to the enigma of desire; the songs of her fourth collection Thapak thapak dil thapak thapak rely on sound and images rather than narratives to crystallize suffering as the one constant in the impermanence of human existence. Those who are familiar with Buddhism will see the reflections of the Buddha's four noble truths in much of Gagan's writing. One can write a lengthy list of Gagan's achievements: the languages into which her books have been translated the prestigious literary prizes she has been awarded but I won't bore you with that. It's not Gagan's fame which has attracted me to her poetry but the intensity the poignancy of her verses. She writes about pain without any sentimentality or gushiness. Her poems are understated deceptively simple occasionally prosaic full of repetitions and yet extremely carefully crafted. She combines stark images with rare expressiveness: expressiveness composed of silences gaps absences disruptions of pulsional pressure which goes beyond language. Lucy Rosenstein did her MA in Indology at Sofia University (Bulgaria) and came to SOAS to further her knowledge of Hindi in 1991 by doing an MA and a PhD in Hindi. While her early research focused on issues of comparative linguistics and textual criticism, her later work moved away from classical philology and embraced literary studies. She did her PhD on Braj Bhasha verse, followed by work on contemporary Hindi poetry. Her publications include numerous articles and two books: Swami Haridas and the Haridasi sampradaya: A study of early Braj Bhasha verse (Egbert Forsten 1997) and Nayi Kavita 'New Poetry' in Hindi: An Anthology (Permanent Black 2003). In the last two decades, the main focus of her work has been child and adolescent mental health, but she has continued to nurture and be nurtured by her deep connection with poetry. Jane Duran was born in Cuba to a Spanish father and an American mother. She was bought up in the USA and Chile, and moved to England after graduating from Cornell University. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and selections have appeared in Poetry Introduction 8 (Faber and Faber, 1993), Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe, 1997) and in La Generación del Cordero (Trilce Ediciones, Mexico, 2000). Her first collection Breathe Now, Breathe (Enitharmon Press, 1995) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon went on to publish four further collections: Silences from the Spanish Civil War (2002), Coastal (2005), Graceline (2010) and American Sampler (2014). Both Coastal and Graceline received Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Together with Gloria García Lorca she translated Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads (2011) and his Sonnets of Dark Love and The Tamarit Divan (2017). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2005.