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An anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. It is from this life of transitions that the themes of Imtiaz Dharker's poetry are drawn: childhood, exile, journeying, home and religious strife. Born in Lahore, Imtiaz Dharker grew up in Glasgow, and now lives in Bombay, where she works as a documentary filmmaker. She is also an accomplished artist, and this selection drawn from her two collections Purdah and Postcards from god includes her own drawings for these sequences.
'In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. Postcards from god meditates upon disquietudes in the poet's chosen society: its sudden acts of violence, its feuds and insanities, forcing her into a permanent wakefulness that ... her eyes with glass lids.
'If the poems collected in Purdah are windows shuttered upon a private world, those gathered into Postcards from god are doorways leading out into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of the tender grace of attention.
'The poems are amplified by powerful black and white drawings by the author. The line is Imtiaz Dharker's sole weapon in a zone of assault which stretches over the Indian subcontinent's bloody history, the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and the torment of an individual caught between two cultures, divergent worldviews' - Ranjit Hoskote, The Times of India.
'Tension is the key. And it is to the tension in her poetry that Imtiaz Dharker's rhythmic skills - her variable line lengths, her almost-but-not-quite iambic metre, her hung or displaced lines - invariably direct our attention' - Michael Hulse.
'The images in these poems are not merely images created for poetic effect: they are like blazing fires compelling the readers to take notice' - Nissim Ezekiel.
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