Augatora
"Augatora" is not a new word: it is a word lost from language a millennium ago. In Old High German it meant, more or less, "eye gate" ('window' with an inbuilt etymology).
The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. India, past and present, remains "a necessary obsession". Here also we see Durban, Riga, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Barcelona, and the small island of Juist off the German North Sea coast, site of her long poem "The Hole in the Wind", broadcast by BBC Radio Drama. Memory, science, language, history and love remain Bhatt's themes; she amply justifies the "New Statesman" claim that she is "one of the finest poets alive" – alive in many different ways.
What the Times Literary Supplement said about "Point No Point: Selected Poems" holds true for "Augatora": "a substantial collection of poems, one that allows us to travel, dream and learn, but one that ultimately moves us by the quietude of its stance and its impeccable articulation".
The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. India, past and present, remains "a necessary obsession". Here also we see Durban, Riga, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Barcelona, and the small island of Juist off the German North Sea coast, site of her long poem "The Hole in the Wind", broadcast by BBC Radio Drama. Memory, science, language, history and love remain Bhatt's themes; she amply justifies the "New Statesman" claim that she is "one of the finest poets alive" – alive in many different ways.
What the Times Literary Supplement said about "Point No Point: Selected Poems" holds true for "Augatora": "a substantial collection of poems, one that allows us to travel, dream and learn, but one that ultimately moves us by the quietude of its stance and its impeccable articulation".
About the author
Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published eight collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, "Brunizem" (1988). Subsequent collections include "Monkey Shadows" (PBS Recommendation, 1991), "The Stinking Rose" (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), "Point No Point" (1997), "Augatora" (PBS Recommendation, 2000), "A Colour for Solitude" (2002), "Pure Lizard" (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 2008), and "Collected Poems" (PBS Special Commendation, 2013). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991, the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000, and the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. In 2014 she was the first recipient of the Mexican International Poetry Prize, Premio Internacional de Poesia Nuevo Siglo de Oro 1914-2014. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London and at the Heinrich Boll Cottage on Achill Island, Ireland. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Currently, she divides her time between Germany and elsewhere.