Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes. These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey (which intensifies in the new poems). Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. When God is a Traveller is her fourth collection of poetry.
'A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich - A remarkable book from a remarkable poet' - John Burnside
'This is writing that creeps up on the reader quietly, sometimes with just the whisper of a sari, or the taste of a lullaby, and yet spins suddenly on the edge of stark recognition - Imtiaz Dharker
'...one of the finest poets writing in India today - It is not dulcet music you hear in Where I Live. It's the swish of swordplay, each poem skewered at sabre-point and then placed on an electric grille to sizzle like a rasher on a barbecue' - Keki Daruwalla, The Hindu.
'...a strong personality and an individual voice; her poems feel as if they are meant to be read aloud as well as on the page... Subramaniam is becoming a major poet' - Bruce King, Journal of Postcolonial Literature
Author
About Arundhathi Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam lives in Bombay where she works as writer, editor and curator. Bloodaxe published her first UK selection, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems, in 2009, which combines selections of work from two Indian collections with new poems. Her latest collection, When God Is a Traveller, is published by Bloodaxe in 2014. She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011). In 2006 she appeared at London's Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society.
