City of Water-Navodaya Series

"City of Water is remarkable for its supple language and tensile strength. Her images are sharp and there is integrity about the core of feeling that propels the poem. One cannot spot any weak moments either in terms of emotion or language...Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision."

Anindita Sengupta's poetry has appeared in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Pratilipi, Kritya and Muse India. Her work is part of the Not a Muse anthology (Haven Books, 2009). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing and in 2009, the Charles Wallace Writers Fellowship. This is her first collection of poetry.

As a first volume, City of Water is remarkable for its supple language and tensile strength. Anindita Sengupta's images are sharp and there is integrity about the core of feeling that propels the poem. One cannot spot any weak moments either in terms of emotion or language. For an initial volume of poetry, the poet exercises considerable control over the craft. Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision. In her poems a money plant, sensing rain, will "flounce"

like the frill of a skirt around the tree leg,

cach leaf shiny as a face scrubbed clean.

A woman will run outside "in her towel-turbaned head" to pick the clothes off the line. Despite the fury of the waters, his eyes, the male lover or friend's eyes, remain cold and the poem will swerve like rain water to its finale. In her world screams escape "as empty air, as ether, as leaf smell,/ bat song and hiatus/ hushed as helium balloons/ gasping into the night sky". People are unaffected. The last stanza shows the poet throwing up. Is she talking of silent, unheard agony or is she disgusted at the icy apathy around her? She leaves things to our imagination.

**Contents and Sample Pages**