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– for Anita Roy
The Six Blind Men and The Elephant
…and they lived happily ever after
Fragments From Three Cantos
Reviews of Dialogue and Other Poems (Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubliee Publication, 2005, reprint 2006) and Not Springtime Yet (HarperCollins India Publishers,2008) |
‘… work is absolutely extraordinary….has an amazing ability to handle historical and mythic material in ways that make them completely new.’ ‘The poems of Priya Sarukkai-Chabria are passionate, sensuous and intelligent, full of energy and enterprise. They hold their dramatic shapes with grace and establish her as a poet to read and return to time and again.’ ‘An extraordinary poetic imagination’ ‘…a poet who has shifted contemporary Indian English poetry to a different gear altogether… ‘… she is a highly competent writer aware of form, of poetic conventions in many different language traditions, with a feeling for cadence, lineation, image, compression and sound. She ranges through an impressive variety of themes and manners. ..Chabria is a pleasure to read. Her appearance here compensated for the shaky start of the series…’ ‘Chabria’s work is exquisite…. Great work, that.’ ‘Through 78 pages of extraordinary poetry, Priya Sarukkai Chabria has more than justified this collection. The four-page Introduction, apart from placing the poems, affords the reader with succinct information on the various traditions she has drawn from. Unlike many of the Indian English poets of the present, Priya doesn’t make her poems obtuse; being also a novelist, she follows a loose narrative pattern in her series of poems.’ ‘Sarukkai Chabria…swoops and dives between space and time…her poems speak for themselves, to the reader and to each other, deliberately and clearly.’ ‘Chabria… sees her ‘novelist impulse’ as informing her poetic one, making her adopt personas and write a series of poems that form loose narrative… Chabria’s personas do not appear trapped in their hopelessness. There is a buoyancy and vigour about their abandonment and a sensuality that is unambiguously expressed in a variety of voices…Chabria ..tries to place her work within several traditions, not always in harmony with them but in a tug-of-war that most times works’ ‘Priya Sarukkai-Chabria’s inclusion in this series of two books is an inspired choice. For hers is a fresh but accomplished voice, one that claims its inheritance from all sources and traditions that she has access to…. Full of striking imagery, the form of these poems allows the passion to be expressed in their fullness, without it becoming an outpouring of emotions…This series … shows what a contemporary poet can do with a traditional form.’ |



- The Gathering of Time
- Priya Sarukkai Chabria at Pratilipi
- Priya Sarukkai Chabria at Open Space
- We Must Talk by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
- Myth
- War Poems from Babylon and Persia, 2005

- To The Land of My Lord by TM Krishna (Carnatic musician and winner of the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay award) in The Indian Express
- In sacred rapture by Chintan Girish Modi, Interview in The Hindu
- Excerpt in Scroll.in
- Love and Language by Arshia Sattar, Open Magazine
- Review by Sumana Roy in Scroll.in
- Preface to new book translation of Andal by Mani Rao, Preface to book
- Beauty in the Beast by Uddalak Mukherjee, Telegraph India
- Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions by Mustansir Dalvi, TimeOut Mumbai
- Into Mumbai's heart by Anupama Raju, The Hindu
- Mumbai’s quaint immersions in light and darkness by Sumana Roy, The Sunday Guardian
- Aandaal/Andal/Antal: The Autobiography Of A Goddess