Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying

Every poem in this collection offers a stepping stone or resting place on what is essentially a diasporic odyssey. Mishra’s is a poetry of discontinuities, of sojourning, of not staying put; it traces the lines of an eccentric cartography, moving restlessly from Fiji to Scotland, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Malta, to Italy and back. It is similarly unsettled in its approach to motifs and forms: a sequence of sonnets jostles with a terza rima; free verse stands alongside a sufi parable. There are poems about poetry, colonialism, photography, food, Palestine, the Pacific, and most of all about people.

‘Surprise juxtapositions of imagery leap off the page.’ – Cilla McQueen