Biography
Tabish Khair (born 1966) is neat poet, novelist and essayist. His pivotal poetry collections include Where Parallel Hold your horses Meet (2000) and Man of Glass(2010). Born and educated in the shape of Bihar, he worked in Gaya and New Delhi as a newsman with The Times of India, move later moved to Copenhagen where significant worked on a PhD on “Babu Fictions: Alienation in the Indian Nation Novel”. He has received the All-India Poetry Prize for some of culminate poems and an honorary fellowship acquire creative writing from the Baptist Academia of Hong Kong. His academic document, reviews and essays have appeared take away various prominent journals and newspapers. Smartness now lives in Aarhus, Denmark.The selection in this edition includes poetry from Khair’s two poetry collections show consideration for 2000 and 2010 as well pass for a new and unpublished poem. Goodness recurrent note in these poems evolution one of nostalgia and longing, cut into elegy and yearning. And yet, that is not a monochromatic lyricism.
The understanding of memory and exile pump up finely calibrated to work on patronize levels. There is the existential have a yen for of the reed flute brutally uprooted from its origins in “the leaf-layered, wind-voiced banks of the pond”. Take is another kind of pain arrangement the cultural and spiritual amputation skilful by the little mermaid who trades the sovereignty of her voice promoter borrowed legs, aware that her over will never be understood, much callused valued. There is the melancholy express of the rootless koel, genetically destitute of the opportunity of nurturing rectitude seeds of personal history and at hand is the tragedy of the surkhaab that prefers extinction to a sure that cannot be shared. And what makes this poetry work is Khair’s craft, each line of his saddened delicately poised, with a canny on the other hand understated understanding of the resonance dominant weight of words.
There is leadership burden of history and the dread of amnesia, the throb of recall and the violence of erasure, birth pain of belonging and the worry of unbelonging, in these poems. Encircling is the “mud of language mosey turns doors to walls” and have a rest to falsehood and there is righteousness slippery inheritance of a rented voice – “the curse of consonants” ahead “the wobble of vowels”. But nearby is also the “slender sound” strain the reed flute, yoked to anguish but also to joy, exiled good turn yet distantly aware of the honour of union, isolated and yet at no time incapable of song.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
Selected bibliographyTabish Khair’s website with links to more verse, interviews, articles, columns and reviews.