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Our Assessment:
B+ : quite impressive, and nicely presented See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review: Magadh is full of uncertainty, of location and nature. The first poem, after the opening 'Invocation', begins: Listen horseman, where's Magadh ?Other places -- like Magadh, classical locales from Indian history -- are similarly concurrently established and lost in a Schrödinger's cat-like duality: All travellers going to Ujjaini:Using the (once-)real places of history, many now lost or completely changed, Verma journeys in a space that is less geographical than now almost mythical. Tellingly, the voice in these poems is often one between places -- or between the same place, both coming and going to it, yet not there. The places are significant not as physical locales; instead, for example: Vaishali is not a cityHere, setting out with a specific destination in mind is no guarantee of reaching it -- far from it, it seems, as destinations (both specific and general) remain elusive and: often'Questions from Friends' sums up much of the cumulative effect of the collection, with its suggested questions and deceptive forward-looking orientation that in fact only loop back in the eternal vicious circles of the sequence: Friends,Even the poems that do not directly invoke history, place, and myth share this dominant sense of duality here, as in 'A Year of Poems', which simply reads: What I wrote, uselessMagadh refers both to many historical Indian locales, as well as a few significant figures, and readers from beyond the sub-continent would surely benefit from annotations or an explanatory afterword; the introductory remarks by translator Rahul Soni and by Ashok Vajpeyi are of some help, but not really sufficient. Otherwise, this bilingual edition from Almost Island Books is certainly impressive: a lovely volume, and an effective translation of a collection that works well to cumulative effect, even as many of the individual pieces also impress on their own. - M.A.Orthofer, 20 June 2013 - Return to top of the page - Magadh:
- Return to top of the page - Hindi-writing author Shrikant Verma (श्रीकांत वर्मा) lived 1931 to 1986. - Return to top of the page -
© 2013-2014 the complete review
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