Pure Lizard
Transformation is the underlying theme of Sujata Bhatt's new collection, the title deriving from a mystical being with skin that is "pure lizard". The natural world is ever present in these poems; monkeys, crickets and bats reappear in new incarnations, and a field of organic sunflowers in Pennsylvania is juxtaposed with sunflowers grown out of the toxic soil of Chernobyl. "Pure Lizard" also documents artistic exchange in its many forms: Schiller's desk is taken to Buchenwald during the Second World War, and Jane Eyre haunts a laboratory in Baltimore. There are poems in response to music by composers as varied as Telemann, Bob Zieff, and Philip Glass, as well as a poetic correspondence with the Welsh writer Gillian Clarke about a writer's sense of home and place, to be broadcast by BBC Radio Drama.
Sujata Bhatt is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. She is, the "New Statesman" declared, "one of the finest poets alive", and alive in a unique way to issues of politics and gender, to place and history, to different cultural and linguistic traditions.
Sujata Bhatt is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. She is, the "New Statesman" declared, "one of the finest poets alive", and alive in a unique way to issues of politics and gender, to place and history, to different cultural and linguistic traditions.
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.