Trying to Say Goodbye
By Adil Jussawalla
Published by Almost Island Books (2011)
Hardcover, 88 pages | ISBN-13: 978-81-921295-0-1
“Forty years on,
with the forest gone,
my sight’s
improved...”
— from “Snakeskin”
This is the long anticipated third collection of poems by Adil Jussawalla, who continues to be a seminal figure in post-independence Indian poetry. Jussawalla’s is an intimate but still-sharp voice, fearless but melancholic, marked by a darting, wily syntax, bristling rhymes, and an original prosody. Here, he moves across time to address an array of histories, both personal and public. He lifts and pays homage to poets, artists, drunks, vagabonds, and eccentrics on the one hand, and to the deep inner life of objects and materials—a wristwatch, a radio, clay, wood, marble, a cloud, a fly—on the other.
Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940. He studied and worked in England from 1957 onwards. He returned to India in 1970. Of Jussawalla’s precocious first collection, Land’s End (1962), Dom Moraes wrote that it “seemed [to him], and to many other poets in England, one of the most brilliant first books published since the war”. Missing Person (1976), a startling hybrid of varied tones and influences, has itself become a deep, acknowledged influence on the generations of Indian poets that came after it. The anthology Jussawalla edited, New Writing in India (1974), a snapshot of Indian writing in the sixties, across languages, is still widely and closely read today. This new collection is certain to join those others in having a lasting impact.
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REVIEWS
“In this late and soberly retrospective collection, Adil Jussawalla confirms his talent as a stern and uncompromising stylist. His versification is tight, controlled, yet eloquently versatile and fluid. If Land’s End (1962) chronicled Jussawalla’s Wanderjahren in Europe, and Missing Person (1976) articulated a harsh and uncompromising attempt to deal with his repatriate experience, Trying to Say Goodbye reasserts Jussawalla’s stature as one of the great English-language poets of his generation—and ours.”
— Graziano Krätli in World Literature Today
“Here it is, a magnificent buffet of a book, taking in everything from a concrete poem to prose poems, juxtaposing a manic American professor in the 1970s against the cosmic despairs of a fresher (one poem follows the next and both become slaps in the face), reworking language “the papads he thappads” and undercutting expectation with “This is a tank./ This is -”.”
— Jerry Pinto in Time Out
“What Jussawalla has is immense control; he lays small charges in the poem that detonate into huge responses in the reader... The poems don't finish in haste, but there is a sense that the poet has found his second wind and the poetry has recovered itself. This is a feat not just of salvage but of renewal. If indeed poetry readers in India knew to wait for Adil Jussawalla's next collection of poems, Trying to Say Goodbye is a book worth waiting for.”
— Sridala Swami in the Sunday Guardian
