Salil Chaturvedi writes short fiction and poetry. He was the Asia region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, the Unisun/British Council Short Story Competition, 2007, and the Wordweavers Poetry Contest 2015. He loves marginal spaces and currently lives on an island in Goa that he describes as a special ‘edge place.'
Reviews for this book:
As a lifelong lover of poetry and of the men and women who create it, I have harvested their works, from the Elizabethans through the Lake Poets to the poets of our own age. But rarely have I picked up a volume that has brought me as much undiluted pleasure as In the Sanctuary of a Poem, by the Indian poet Salil Chaturvedi. Some of these fifty poems celebrate love between human beings; all of them celebrate a love of nature. Mr. Chaturvedi’s poems are best described as being translucent, because of the simplicity of the language in which they are couched. These are some of the ones that moved me the most: ‘How good it is the darkness of your skin’, ‘Desires on a beach’, ‘Fireflies in the bedroom’. Outstanding among the nature poems are ‘I saw a god’, which is about the impact of watching a snake in a meadow; ‘Ants’, a six-line gem that holds hints on how humans could comport themselves; ‘Summer surprise’, also six lines long. ‘Last night I sat down to thank the universe’ needs no explanation. In so much that is good, for me the star of this slim collection is ‘Making the mistake of stopping before a rendezvous.’ This is a poem that deserves to be anthologized; I have read and reread it enough times that I have memorized it already.
-Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, author of several books including Tivolem, Loving Ayesha and The Miscreant
A Modern Wordsworth
Wordsworth, who with Coleridge helped to launch the Romantic Movement in English poetry in 1798, wrote that a deep reflection on Nature yielded one the wisdom and meaning of life. His philosophy appears to have found a harbour in the soul of Salil Chaturvedi, 49, a modern poet living on the island of Chorao in Goa.
In his new book of nature poems entitled In the Sanctuary of a Poem, Chaturvedi not only lays bare his soul’s affinity to nature but also celebrates nature’s inhabitants like the ants, birds, trees, plants and flowers in a figurative language that is the medium of poetry.
Just as sound is the medium of music, colour the medium of painting, movement the medium of dance, so is language the medium of poetry --- a definition coined by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media guru who also invented the expression “the medium is the message.”
Indeed, in Chaturvedi’s collection of 50 poems written in blank verse with rhythm though ---some short, a few long as the mood carries his message ---the expression (medium) startles, surprises, reflects upon, and persuades in unusual ways only a poet could design, divine, envision. For instance, in the titular poem, a small tree frog jumps from m to m inside the poem. As I read it, m to m suggests metre to metre, that is, the frog’s rhythm as it leaps from syllable to syllable---a clever, imaginative ploy to attract the reader as if “the forest flows freely” inside the poet’s veins.
Alliterations, such as “the forest flows freely,” are the signposts of Chaturvedi’s poems, the markers that shift a mood or the tone of his voice. For example, in Then is how I like my rain, the poet hears tales “when strings of silver streaming down/ sting my skin so slight.”
Yes, as I noted before, Chaturvedi’s narrative voice sings and celebrates Nature’s variegated vicinities, its sounds and silences, personified as becomes the poet. To know the tree, he becomes the tree. Wordsworth would be proud!
- Ben Antao, author of several books including Money and Politics, The Concubine and Selected Stories, and A Madhouse in Goa and Nine Other Stories.
