Annapurna Poems

Poems New & Collected Yuyutsu RD Sharma ISBN 81=8250-040-0 2008 Hard. Rs. 295.00 Indian

This is a major anthology from one of South Asia’s most prominent poet’s who has made Annapurna region his home for last two decades.

Yuyutsu’s devotion for the mountains and the people living there is unparalleled. Though his work was interrupted with the rise of insurgency and the consequent political turmoil in the Himalayan nation, the poet continued to long for the hidden valleys and mule paths where, as the scriptures say, the soul of the Gods lives.

Even in his dreams he conjures the treks to the remote Himalayan regions, searching for life on the bleeding mule paths of human struggle, listening to the chorus of cicadas and dramas of hunger and strife in the hushed grounds of Little Paradise Lodge, chartering history of human attempts to invade the realm of eternal snow with moving cameras, frozen spaghetti and plastic bags.

Like exquisite fields of Himalayan flowers, these are poems of high artistic integrity about harsh truths of mystery, history and humanity.

Sensual, sharp and stunning, these concrete images will leave the readers breathless. A huge achievement, bringing alive the unsung agony of the people of the high Himalayas.

Available via Amazon UK.
Review (Brooklyn Rail)

Book Extract

Mules

On the great Tibetan
salt route they meet me again

old forsaken friends …

On their faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep

their lives worn out,
their legs twisted, shaking

from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.

Age long bells clinging
to them like festering wounds

beating notes
of a slavery modernism brings:

cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,
solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards

sacks of rice
and iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai.

Butterflies of
the terraced fields know their names.

Singing brooks tempests
of their breathless climbs.

Traffic alert
and time-tested, they climb

carrying
dreams of posh peacocks

pamphlets
of a secret religious war

filth
of an ecologist’s sterile semen

entire kitchen
for a cocktail party at the base camp

defunct development
agenda of guilty donors

the West’s weird visions
lusting for an instant purge.

Stone steps
of the mountains embossed

on their drugged brains,
like lines of aborted love

scratched
on the historic rocks of waterspouts.

Starry skies
of the dozing valleys know

the ache
of their secret sweat.

Sunny days
along the crystal rivers

taste
of their bleeding eyes.

Greatest fiction
of the struggling lives lost,

like real mules
clattering their hooves on the flagstones,

in circling
the cruel grandeur

of blood thirsty
mule paths around the glaciers of Annapurnas.

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