Colour for Solitude
Revolving around the public and private lives of the great modern painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, this collection explores the artist's relationship with her craft and her friendship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff. Inspired by the artist's numerous self-portraits, Bhatt transports the image of Modersohn-Becker to present-day Germany. This book-length sequence of poems presents a rich and fully conceived history of the inner and outer worlds of one of the century's great modern painters.
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.
Reviews
"Bhatt's style is refreshingly plain and direct, depending for its lyricism on moments of gentle repitition" – Alan Marshall, The Daily Telegraph