A literary style rubs up against a Caribbean pulse' - Philip Gross, Poetry Review. Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Born in Lahore, Imtiaz Dharker grew up in Glasgow, and now lives in Bombay, where she works as a documentary filmmaker. In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. The poems are amplified by powerful black and white drawings by the author.
Tension is the key.
The bird on the branch was singing of gladness, disrupting my dreams with its dreadful screech. The spiritual intermixed with the bawdy, the courageous with the cowardly, the kindly with the cruel - Common Carnage rejects the decorous and decorative to map the complexity, the common carnage of our lives, as it seeks to understand our nature. Stephen Dobyns is a spinner of dark, extravagant fables of a world we live or may live in. They present a view of what it means to be human which is at once both funny and bleak, compassionate and remorseless. The invitation is to see the fantastic as routine, as one does in Kafka' - New York Times.