Jejuri [Paperback]

A sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems,Jejuriis one of the great books of modern India.Jejuriis a site of pilgramage in author Arun Kolatkar's native state of Maharashtra, andJejurithe poem is the record of a visit to the town -- a place that is as crassly commercial as it is holy, as modern and ruinous as it is ancient and enduring. Evoking the town's crowded streets, many shrines, and mythic history of sages and gods, Kolatkar's poem offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion. For the essence of the poem is a spiritual quest, the effort to find the divine trace in a degenerate world. Spare, comic, sorrowful, singing,Jejuriis the work of a writer with a unique and visionary voice."Available for the first time outside Kolatkar’s native India, this sequence of poems (written in English, and first published in 1976) describes a trip to a Hindu pilgrimage site in the state of Maharashtra. Amit Chaudhuri’s excellent introduction tells us that Kolatkar was both an amateur musician and a successful art director in the Bombay advertising world, which perhaps explains the acuteness of his ear and eye. Veering between the epigrammatic and the incantatory, these poems capture a place that is both ancient and modern, with crumbling temples and “stock exchange quotations.” Kolatkar’s pages are populated by saints, beggars, prostitutes, and priests, by rats, stray dogs, and the occasional butterfly, a creature whose transitory beauty is meticulously described: “There is no story behind it. / It is split like a second. / It hinges around itself.” --The New Yorker

"Kolatkar (1932–2004) became a leading literary light in India, writing in Marathi and in English about the contradictions of the developing subcontinent. Composed in English, this fastidious, ironic lyric cycle helped make Kolatkar a national, ilƒ½