When God Is a Traveller

by Arundhathi Subramaniam

Overview

Here are poems that 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780371160
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/20/2014
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize, she divides her time between Bombay and New York. She has published two previous books of poetry in Britain with Bloodaxe, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with new work, and When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and was awarded the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy. Her latest collection, Love Without a Story, is published by Bloodaxe in 2020. She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011) and Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (2014). In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at London’s Southbank Centre in January 2015.

Table of Contents

Textile 9

How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods 11

The Way You Arrive 13

My Friends 14

Eight Poems for Shakuntala 16

Printer's Copy 26

I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes 27

The City and I 28

Or Take Mrs Salim Sheikh 30

Benaras 32

The Builder's Lobby 35

And here's middle age again 36

Bones 37

I Knew a Cat 39

Transplant 40

Jogger's Park 41

You and I that Day in Florence 42

Where the Script Ends 44

The Dark Night of Kitchen Sinks 46

Hierarchies of Crisis 48

Quick-fix Memos for Difficult Days 51

Living with Earthquakes 52

Bhakti (with some adulteration) 56

Shoe Zen 57

Six about Love Stories 58

Border 65

When God is a Traveller 66

Poems Matter 68

Editorial Reviews

"A sense of wonder and striking contrasts pervade the Indian poet’s fourth collection. The sacred meets the everyday, cerebral wordplay delivers full-blooded emotion, and ancient Hindu myths run alongside contemporary urban life. Breathtaking in scope, taking in religious faith, friendships, love affairs and existential themes. Often the work questions poetry itself – but it is always rooted in the physical and the tangible, with fresh visual imagery that really packs a punch. Bold and thought-provoking." - Juanita Coulson, The Lady

From the Publisher