I Know You Are Here

Following the publication of her first book of poems, Shout, it took Gayatri Majumdar nearly 18 years to put together her second, I Know You Are Here, which has poems she has been writing since 2011. While she continues to write about everyday encounters, there, however, is an added dimension of inner and literal journeys she takes to find moments of silence and satori only to discover often that they are right there in her backyard.These poems are deceptively simple, and linger in the mind long after you have closed the book. Menka Shivdasani, author of FrazilMajumdar says it is on nights ‘when love, hate, joy/ pain, and all foreign policies fail’, that one must admit a poem in. One is grateful for those failures, for it is thanks to them that we have Majumdar’s second book of verse, still capable of surprising us with throwaway lines of casual adeptness such as these: ‘Ornithologists describe egrets as lazy;/ I forget now what egrets say about humans.’ Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of When God is a Traveller