My Dead Flowers

The poems in My Dead Flowers are rivers; they meander, change course, are a swirl of eddies and back-eddies. They snake through the streets of Paris, New York City, Calcutta. And they sing of love - of its unruliness; its faltering ways; of its tenacious hold over memory. Remind me that I was once alive, Buku Sarkar says, because of you.

These are poems that reveal themselves not only in verse - hurried jottings on paper - but as photographs, each 'a reminder / there's nothing left'.

Thayil Editions Number Two is an invocation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. But its preoccupations have less to do with good and evil, decadence and death, than with coming out alive - 'Once you've stood in/ the middle of a park / With no clothes on, / You can do anything.'