Icelight Hoskote Ranjit

Set in an age of ecological catastrophe, Icelight eloquently accepts transience yet asserts the robustness of hopeIcelight, Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge--of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany.

A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. The 'I' of these poems is not a sovereign 'I'. In 'Tacet', the speaker asks: "What if I had/ no skin/ Of what/ am I the barometer?" Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of