Icelight

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet cultural theorist and curator. His previous collections include <i>Jonahwhale</i> <i>Hunchprose </i>among many others. He has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award the S.H Raza Award for Literature and the JLF researcher-in-residence at BAK Utrecht. His poems have been translated into German Hindi Bengali Marathi Irish Swedish Spanish and Arabic. <p>Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poetry enacts the experience of standing at the edge-of a life a landscape a world assuming new contours of going up in flames. Yet the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany.<br><i>Icelight</i> transits between audacious exploration and contemplative retreat doubt and belief melancholia and momentum. Hoskote's poetry unseals deep scales of geological time and strata of historical memory always aware of the perils currently confronting the planet. His poems are informed by the unfolding crises of war and ecocide. This is a book about transitions and departures eloquent in its acceptance of transcience in the face of mortality.</p> <i>Icelight</i> is a remarkable collection of poetry that offers readers a thought-provoking exploration of universal themes and concerns such as the interconnectedness of people through distances of time and memory. Ultimately Hoskote's skillful use of language structure and imagery creates a deeply moving reading experience. Like jewelled windows in a war-torn city Ranjit Hoskote's exquisitely crafted poems offer tantalizing glimpses of a disintegrating world. In<i>?Icelight</i> Ranjit Hoskote thinks by way of the heart which is of course how good poetry is made. A deeply felt reflection on the ecological crisis that is at once spiritual and political this collection of poems Hoskote’s eighth bears witness to the slow death of our planet.....Hoskote approaches the bleakest of life’s predicaments through his trademark cinematographic images—delicate and shot through like gold at once everyday and mysterious. A poet must be kind to human life and leave readers with hope. In Hoskote’s poems hope comes from memory where brief images and encounters of light appear.... In Ranjit Hoskote’s new collection of poetry <i>Icelight</i> he is withdrawing from us. That is not good news. But where is he withdrawing to? The answer to that question is enough reason to read this book. Ranjit Hoskote is at a moment of reckoning. In <i>Icelight</i> the celebrated poet and writer’s eighth gathering of poems there is an imaginary point somewhere on this earth perhaps an address that most resembles home where contrasting fortunes are being played out on a precarious knife’s-edge — transience and immortality; belief and betrayal; family and anonymity; faith and fragility.