Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides.
Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.
Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and three books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.
'By turns laconic and passionate, she asks questions about morality and integrity that many poets simply refuse to take on. Yet she is also an extraordinary love poet… A remarkable book from a remarkable poet.' - John Burnside, Poetry Review, on Where I Live
'These beautiful poems have that quality of being breathed into the world that always means that deep experience went into them. The spirituality here is so light, so witty, so spontaneous, so open to the unknown, so open to the life of the mind, so generous, so visceral, how did it come to be so…heavy a topic in the West? How did it come to be a topic at all?' – Dennis Nurkse
'Subramaniam’s verse is imbued with the spiritual and mythic in this wonderful collection, Love Without A Story. Poised and measured, these poems encourage the reader to think and feel deeply, to sit and watch as Subramaniam unveils artfully composed observations about the cosmos we inhabit and those we share it with. Love Without a Story is a breath-taking and heart-warming collection.' – Poetry Book Society Bulletin
'Arundhathi Subramaniam's collection, Love Without a Story, is crammed full of delicious sensations, drawn from a multitude of cultures... My lasting impression of her work is of sheer, inventive, self-delighting energy... a fabulous book!.' – Dorothy Yamamoto, ARTEMISpoetry
'To read Love Without a Story... is to be in the presence of a poet who is capable of rendering the physical and the everyday with a sort of sensual plenitude whilst at the same time exploring connections outwards onto more transcendental, sometimes mythical planes...' – Tom Phillips, Inkroci Magazine
'Love Without a Story is a lyrical exposition of the journey through life; we are left the richer for having read these poems.' – Sue Wallace-Shaddad, The Alchemy Spoon
'A sense of wonder and striking contrasts pervade the Indian poet’s fourth collection. The sacred meets the everyday, cerebral wordplay delivers full-blooded emotion, and ancient Hindu myths run alongside contemporary urban life. Breathtaking in scope, taking in religious faith, friendships, love affairs and existential themes. Often the work questions poetry itself – but it is always rooted in the physical and the tangible, with fresh visual imagery that really packs a punch. Bold and thought-provoking.' – Juanita Coulson, The Lady, on When God Is a Traveller
'Arundhathi Subramaniam has already won acclaim as a poet of integrity… There is a beautiful uncertainty about her poems… intimately physical, intense enough to scald and char, along with a will to withdraw, to renounce… unhibitedly sensual while still yearning for transcendence. This ambivalence, combined with a sense of wonder, of unexpectedness, of moods as well as words, is what marks her apart,' – K. Satchidanandan, Frontline, on When God Is a Traveller.
Arundhathi Subramaniam live at Ledbury Poetry Festival
Arundhathi Subramaniam reads and introduces a selection of poems from her two Bloodaxe titles, When God Is a Traveller and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems: ‘How Some Hindus Find ‘Their Personal Gods’’, My Friends’, ‘Winter, Delhi, 1997’, ‘Madras, November, 1995’, ‘Home’, ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’, ‘I Speak for Those with Orange Lunchboxes’, ‘Or Take Mrs Salim Sheikh’, ‘Where the Script Ends’ and ‘Prayer’. This video shows part of the reading she gave at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 8 July 2016 following an interview with Maitreyabandu which will be posted separately.
Arundhathi Subramaniam reads eight poems from Where I Live
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. Neil Astley filmed her reading a selection of her work from Where I Live in Bombay in November 2011. Here she reads eight poems: 'Winter, Delhi, 1997', 'To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian', 'Prayer', 'Home', 'Madras', 'I Live on a Road', 'Recycled' and 'Confession', all from Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009).
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