Icelight

by Ranjit Hoskote

Overview

Set in an age of ecological catastrophe, Icelight eloquently accepts transience yet asserts the robustness of hope

Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The 'I' of these poems is not a sovereign 'I'. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In 'Tacet', the speaker asks: "What if I had/ no skin/ Of what/ am I the barometer?" Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.

Aubade

Rumours of wind, banners of cloud.
The low earth shakes but the storm
has not arrived. You pack

for the journey, look up, look through
the doors at trees shedding their leaves
too soon, a track on which silk shoes
would be wasted, a moon

still dangling above a boat.
Wearing your salt mask, you face
the mulberry shadows.
The valley into which
you're rappelling

is you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819500557
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

RANJIT HOSKOTE (Bombay, India) is a poet, cultural theorist, and curator. This year he was honored with the 7th Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Poetry Award by the Jaipur Literature Festival. His seven collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems, Central Time, Jonahwhale (published by Arc in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, which won a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation in 2020 and, most recently, Hunchprose. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Bengali, Irish Gaelic, Marathi, Swedish, Spanish, and Arabic.

Table of Contents

I. • 1.Tacet • 2.Aubade • 3. Retreat • 4.Witness • 5.Rock • 6.Noor • 7.Spur • 8. Trigger • 9. Groove • 10. Fresco • 11. Breath • 12. Bed • II. • 13. Eclipse • 14. Night Ferry • 15. Runner • 16. Foreigner • 17. Sentence • 18. Wind • 19. Paishachi • 20. Apostle • 21. Redacted • 22. Postscript • 23. Crow Hymn • 24. What Did I Miss? • III. • 25. All Gods Travel • 26. Call If You're Lost • 27. Plague • 28. Juggler • 29. The Mist Shop • 30. Planet • 31. Storefront Self-portrait • 32. Swimmer • 33. Torso • 34. Dust • 35. Terminus • 36. Bait • IV. • 37. Icelight • 38. Bookmark • 39. Clock • 40. Glover • 41. Still Life with Oranges • 42. Descant • 43. Ocean Park • 44. Slope • 45. Tune • 46. Exit • 47. The Science of Detection • 48. Miramar V. • 49. Column • 50. Ritual • 51. Temple • 52. Matinée • 53. Gravity • 54. Talisman • 55. In this Country of Silence • 56. Monsoon Song • 57. Title • 58. Lesson • 59. Anthem • 60. Krishna's End • VI. • 61. Catapult • 62. Departures • 63. Skeleton • 64. Under the Southern Cross • 65. Neighbours • 66. Fleece • 67. Mission • 68. Afternoon Poem • 69. The Harappan Merchant's Complaint • 70. Switch • 71. Roar • 72. Return • Notes • Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"For poems probing deep ontological and existential concerns, these are remarkably free of lecture or cant. Sophisticated readers will grab especially, but this work is accessible to all."—Library Journal

"[Icelight] 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."—Ella A. Anthony, Harvard Crimson

"Icelight is a collection that will always keep the reader on their toes. It never presumes to lecture, and yet it delivers discrete little packets of wisdom in an orderly, elegant manner."—Aditya Mani Jha, Open Magazine

"Visibility must be earned when you read Hoskote. His craft is laced with alchemical properties. Only the reader's intimacy can melt the words that reveal the poem."—Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, Scroll.in

"Because Ranjit Hoskote lives a double life as art critic and poet, we might expect him to be drawn to art history and ekphrasis. But in fact, almost all the poems in Icelight are concerned with shifts in perspective that function not merely as aesthetic tropes, but as a philosophical insistence on the simultaneity of different viewpoints, of cultural differences, and of those multiplicities that compose any self—what Hoskote calls 'the prism of this moment.' His poems derive their thrilling energy from the way Hoskote toggles between precise description and conceptual reflection, modulations that charge these poems with muscular tension."—Forrest Gander, author of Be With

"At the heart of this utterly beautiful, resonant, and moving collection is a profound sense of South Asia's role in world history, and the title poem's image of an Ice Age artist. The beginning of human attention to animal, nature and the earth, but also the beginning of what human does to earth, 'maimed and gloried' through art."—Ruth Padel, author of Beethoven Variations

From the Publisher

04/01/2023

In pristine, conversational language shot through with sharp imagery and a meditative sense of life's key questions, award-winning Indian poet/critic Hoskote examines who we are (it's "what we've lost"), where we are ("Let me tell you/ why you're here"), our search for self ("the valley into which/ you're rappelling// is you"), and our momentous efforts to express ourselves (his breath "leaving me to catch up/ halting and ranging in its wake/ calling out to it by every name/ I have waited all my life to speak"). If loss figures largely in his ponderings ("What we've lost/ reclaims us"), so does the future. One poem muses on paths to take ("Have I stood here before?"), while elsewhere a man clambering up a mountain peak clutching a contracted earth "[gazes]/ down steep slopes to the promised land." And if "Paishachi" looks back to speak of theories about a successor language to Sanskit that literally translates as the "language of ghosts," "Apostle" examines Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's sense of the visiting Isaiah Berlin as a "guest from the future." Throughout, readers will feel forever on the verge. VERDICT For poems probing deep ontological and existential concerns, these are remarkably free of lecture or cant. Sophisticated readers will grab especially, but this work is accessible to all.—Barbara Hoffert

Library Journal