No rhododendron : poems /
Part elegy, part poetry of witness and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang. How d...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Pittsburgh :
University of Pittsburgh Press,
[2025].
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| Series: | Pitt poetry series.
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| Summary: | Part elegy, part poetry of witness and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang. How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from schoolchildren’s perspective reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making and mythopoeticism. |
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| Physical Description: | 108 pages ; 23 cm. |
| ISBN: | 9780822967484 0822967480 |