Grills and Other Poems

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Description:

Author: Mohan Ramanan
Pages: 116
Year of Publication: 2014
Price: Rs 250
ISBN:
978-93-5045-075-8 (9789350450758)

About the Author:
Mohan Ramanan was born in Kolkata in 1949 and was educated there, in Bangalore and in Chennai. He obtained a Ph.D. in modern poetry from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in 1978 and started teaching English at the University of Hyderabad the following year, where he continues to be a professor. Professor Ramanan has published widely and on modern poetry in particular. He has held fellowships at Amherst, Barcelona, Missouri and Oxford. This is his first collection of poetry, the result of thirty years of writing.

Teaser:

Grills

From bedroom to kitchen, mother,
was that horrible verandah,
grilled like a prison-gate,
opening out to anarchy –
Patta, I remember, kept banging his head on
these grills,
when Patti lay dying;
Patti survived but Patta did not –
But those blank spaces were a gothic terror.
Do you not recall, Amma,
and how you were there for me,
and I disappeared into the folds of your sari,
and Appa came to announce
that Patta had passed on
and I wept bitterly at those very grills,
blessed with Patta’s touch,
in memory of Patti’s penultimate illness;
And now she is gone too and Appa
and only you Amma remain –
A reminder to me of life and death,
of what has gone and of the sister who was then
yet to be but now is,
of the spouse and the kids who have followed
when they too will bang their heads on these grills
for what must eventually inevitably follow.

Contents:
90 poems

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