Announcing Final List of The Poets of Eternal Snow

Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of  One Hundred Twenty FivePoetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma

 Edited by David Austell & Kathleen D Gallagher

ISBN : 81-8250-0915 2017 Paperback pp 309 plus  24 Photo pages

John Clarke

Tracie Morell

Lori Ann Kusterbeck

David Ray

James Ragan

Ravi Shankar

Eileen O’Connor

Gorka Lasa

Elena Karina Byrne

Pascale Petit

Chuck Joy

Lorraine Conlin

Paul Nash &

Denise La Neve

Andrew Taylor

Amarendra Khatua

Meera Ekkanath Klein

Eskimo Pie

Christi Shannon Kline

Revigya Joshi

Kathleen D Gallagher

David Austell

Maria Heath Beckett

Renay Sanders

Shawn Aveningo

Juan Carlos Abril

Tim Kahl

Dom Kafley

Judy Ray

Tera Vale Regan

Diane Frank

Lady K (Kathy Smith)

Karen Corinne Herceg

Kate Lamberg

Penny Kline

Sharon Metzler-Dow

M. L. Williams

Robert Scotto

Nicole Barriere

Anne Fritz

Ruth Danon

Tim Tomlinson

Mary E. Weems

Roopa Ramamoorthi

Dan Szczesny

Nancy Aidé Gonzalez

Nancy R Lange

Michael Graves

Eugene Hyon

Marcus Bales

Peter V. Dugan

Aixia de Villanova

Leah Taylor

Cristina Querrer

Bari Falese

Agnes Marton

Patricia Carragon

Dd. Spungin

Verónica Aranda

Samantha Bear

Darlene Costello

Mindy Kronenberg

David Axlerod

Tony Barnstone

Russ Green

Alessandra Francesca

Nabina Das

Ronnie Norpel

Eddie Woods

Kim Nuzzo

Chiff Fyman

Barun Bajracharya

Shreejana Bhandari

Charles Peter Watson

Christopher Wheeling

Merik van der Torren

Art Good Times

Robin Mets

Erica Mapp

Bill Wolak

Roxanne Hoffman

Civa Bhusal

James Romano

D. B. Meltzer 

Cee Williams

Bidur Prasad Chaulagain

Vicki Iorio

Barbara Novack

Mary Ryan Garcia

Theresa Göttl Brightman

Steve Brightman

Jack Tar

Kymberly Avinasha Brown

Catherine Gigante-Brown

Marion Palm

Hélène Cardona

André Baum

Phillip Giambri

Devin Wayne Davis

Alex Symington

Rajesh Siddharth

Marisa Moks-Unger

Lorraine  Bouchard

Don Carroll

Anthony Murphy

Timothy Gager

John J. Trause

Jack Locke
Anuj Ghimire

Elaine Karas-Shadle

Irene O’ Garden

Allegra Jostad Silberstein

Gaurav Bhattarai

Su Polo
Ernie Burns

Roger McClain

Ken Ruan

Jen Pezzo

Marcus Calvert

Thomas Jenney

Judi Chabola

Bishwa  Sigdel

Carolyn Wells

Arun Budhathoki

Carol Hebald

Melissa Hobbs

Jan Garden Castro
Swati Sharma

World Literature Today, May issue, on Yuyutsu Sharma's Quaking Cantos

VERSE

Author: 

Yuyutsu Sharma

New Delhi. Nirala. 2016. 81 pages.

On what seemed like an ordinary day in 2015, a series of rumbles jostled the Nepali region, killing thousands and thrusting countless more into homelessness. An encounter with this disorientating rift produced Quaking Cantos, a visual and verbal response to the wreckage that emerged when planet ground against earth. Much like the title itself, Quaking Cantos—either an epic poem or a quavering song, depending on orientation—is a stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing, rendezvous with torment of the highest order. In this compilation, photography by Prasant Shrestha joins the verse of Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma to produce a slim rejoinder to an otherwise blind and mute confrontation with chaos.

Sleek and glossy images smolder from behind the eyes and intersperse this rubblelike arrangement of verse, the cover of which prominently demands an immediate reckoning with unexpected tumult. Bricks, dust, and the unrecognizable remains of a once-normal life confront the reader before the title page to part 1, “I generally do not cry . . .” and once again in the middle of part 2, “Seven Things That Caused the Quakes.” (The title page to part 1 likewise locates itself before the table of contents, another disjunction.) Two etchings of the writer’s face directly follow the epilogue, “A Song of Extinguished Hearths,” and portray the writer with eyes shut and, later, wide open.

With eyes wide shut, emotions tremor from page to page throughout two parts and their summation. Somnolent images of an ancestral grandmother shuffle from one world to the next, leaving Sharma, as it were, to mull over the collective remains of grief under a vast dome of sky. Paradox meets fate when, in an initial poem entitled “Twisted Galaxies,” Sharma soulfully pens: “My bed shakes / as I prepare to reclaim / fractured / fragments of my sleep.”

Like many collections of verse, Quaking Cantos ends in epilogue. What is different is that the grandmother, once again, instructs the scribe to sing, as he recalls, “A song of livid flames / rising out of clay hearths / in makeshift shacks / along the mule paths.” A spiritual quest in search of explanation journeys through a cacophony of images yet ends under the flames of the unknown of what was once possessed but has been lost. Transient and reflective, Quaking Cantos distills loss into revelation as only a shaman and photographer can envisage.

Andrea Dawn Bryant
Georgetown University