Poetry in a time of terror - Rukmini Bhaya Nair

These essays, together with a detailed Introduction and Postscript, broadly focus on the question of poetry. Wide ranging in their references, and written in a lyrical and inviting style, the writings engage with a host of political questions relating to nation, language, translation, borders, gender, sexuality, and more. How can an individual poet define her own voice in the face of the overwhelming presence of earlier, often dead, poets' voices? What connect our 'new' postcolonial, transnational anxieties to the rampant celebrations of cruelty and torture that have always been the subject of poetry from humankind's earliest epics? Is poetry the antithesis of terror or is it terror's very essence?
While grappling with these questions, the underlying premise is that poems, even the most apparently everyday ones, are texts of crisis; they are our first language when confronted with the incomprehensible, with sublime joy, or with terror out of the sky. The book will be of interest to scholars and researchers from many disciplines including literature, history, gender studies, and cultural studies.