When you whirl round and round with a dead man’s shadow you must be careful not to fall

by Perundevi

Translated by N Kalyan Raman

English 188 pages 1 edition

A good poem does not seek love It seeks only to write itself Perundevi’s poems and antipoems sidestep and overturn entrenched literary conventions even as they seek to ‘enlarge the scope of what may enter a poem’. All manner of sentient beings-humans, animals, birds, fish and insects-and a teeming variety of objects, including smartphones, drones, luggage trolleys, sex-toys, wine glasses and flowerpots, share equal space in Perundevi’s poetic field, continually acting upon one another. Imbued with the richness and complexity of this relational life, her poems give expression, perhaps for the first time, to situations and feelings that are familiar yet ineffable to most of us. In N. Kalyan Raman’s measured translation, the dry wit and sharp-edged irony of Perundevi’s poetry pins readers to the wall and forces them to confront some profound truths about our world. Prophetic and bold, these poems, selected from eight collections published in Tamil over the last two decades, will stay with you long after you have read them. “