Shadow Reader
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Beautifully illustrated in Imtiaz Dharker's distinctive style, Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy.
Imtiaz Dharker’s new collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.
Dharker's main themes, drawn from a life of transitions, are explored with new depth: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. An accomplished visual artist, the collection includes many of her drawings, which form an integral part of the work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dharker (Luck Is the Hook) combines her poetry and drawings to deliver an exquisite and complex vision of exile, immigration, and adopted homelands. The poems go beyond simple ekphrasis to consider the power dynamics of language and text; in one entry responding to a 19th-century sketch by Queen Victoria (of the Maharaja Duleep Singh dressing the queen's son, Prince Arthur, in a turban), the speaker reflects on what is missing: "We stand outside the line/ of vision, millions of us, day labourers/ in paradise gardens, who scurry underground/ so our shadows never mar the path of the king." Dharker's illustrations amplify the language of the poems to create potent visual metaphors, as in a series of drawings that depict threads of fabric on a traditional loom transforming into lines of poetry, suggesting an alchemical interplay between the two forms. Elsewhere, Dharker expresses concern over the use of technologies, such as drones, to construct images largely indifferent to human suffering: "All simplified./ Some live, some die." This spectacular collection astonishes.
