Point No Point: Selected Poems

by Sujata Bhatt

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Hers is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published six collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, Brunizem (1988). Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (PBS recommendation, 1991), The Stinking Rose (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (PBS Recommendation, 2000), and A Colour for Solitude (2002). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry, and has translated poems by Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin (Dedalus Press, 2007). She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Currently, Sujata Bhatt lives in Germany with her husband and daughter.

Reviews

[alisha]

“And suffering is
when I walk around Ahmedabad for this is the place
I’ve always loved this is the place I’ve always hated for this is the place
I can never be at home in this is the place
I will always be at home in.
Suffering is
when I am in Ahmedabad after ten years
and I learn for the first time
I will never choose to live here. Suffering is living in America and not being able to write a damn thing about it. Suffering is
not for me to tell you about.”

Captures the indian immigrant experience beautifully

[Nicky]

I liked some of the imagery and such, but for the most part it didn't do much for me. I didn't read every single poem -- a lot of them just didn't interest me.

[Luccia Gray]

When we read Sujata Bhatt's poetry we become part of her multicultural life experiences. We "breathe the dust" in Ahmedabad in Go to Ahmedabad (p. 49), and listen to "the humming of steel against wind" in New York, see the "silvers of wood" on Vancouver Island...

We wander around from Point No Point (p. 11). How do the places we live affect the way we think?
Why name a place Point No Point?
In any case, here we are, you said,
in a new landscape - will it change your mind?

We searches for ourselves, for our tongues (p. 32).She found two in this bilingual poem:
I ask you, What would you do
If you had two tongues in your mouth?

Finally she reminds us that however much we are displaced, we can only find ourselves inside ourselves, not outside ...
From "The One Who Goes Away" (p. 105)
I am the one
who always goes
away with my home
which can only stay inside
in my blood - my home which does not fit
with any geography.

My favourite, The Stinking Rose (p. 125), for its sensuousness and play on Shakespeare. The search for ourselves can be shared and pleasurable:
You who dined with us tonight
this garlic will sing to to your heart
to your slippery muscles - will keep
your nipples and your legs from sleeping.

Her poems are a journey, her journey and our own journey in search of ourselves. A pleasure to read and to share...

[Marcy]

I have read a lot of Indian poetry, but I have never run across Bhatt's work before either in stand alone volumes or in poetry anthologies. She does a number of things that I love to see in poetry: she combines languages and uses those various languages to amplify various sounds and to express the ways in which language is the key to culture as in "Search for My Tongue." I also really like her political poems like "3 November 1984," which remind me of June Jordan's political poems, especially those she wrote about Lebanon. Her poems like "Wine from Bordeaux" are particularly timely right now given the nuclear disaster in Japan--this poem resonates through its imagery about the disaster at Chernobyl. There is quite a range and mixture of images and style. It is quite a lovely collection of poems.

[Lois]

Word search puzzles on the Indian poet Sujata Bhatt are now available at http://syllapuzzlesliteratureenglish.... and http://syllapuzzlesliteratureenglish.....

[tshegolovesreading]

cute, entertaining.