Speaking Tiger Monk on a Hill: Poems by Guru T. Ladakhi

These are delicate, sensual poems of inwardness and solitude but also of place and people. There are startlingly tender accounts of love and grief and a brooding lyricism brought to the description of towns and Himalayan history. A wonderful first collection.’Anjum Hasan‘ Monk on a Hill comes at you like a ship on the horizon with pennants flying in the wind. These poems bear the insignia of diverse kingdoms, continents and journeys unfurling in unexpected ways the truth about time, memory; of fathers and sons, of mothers and heirlooms, what a maze of life the years have been.

There is music here, a dozen songs in 12 bar blues and devotion, I who have grown like a rock here/ witnessed every grass and cloud that passed, where images combine with text to give meaning to the vision of the poet that is, in short, “very cool” and, at the same time, thought-provoking, with an essence of spirituality. These are words from the heart. Beautiful. Evocative.’ Mamang Dai‘People, places, postscript name the three sections into which Guru T. Ladakhi’s poems in Monk on a Hill are emotively divided into. As a visual imagist, Ladakhi is adept at evoking scenes and feelings with short, descriptive lines and sensual similes; at times such compressed beauty suggests transience and decaymen and women, too, fade away and die.