Yuyutsu Sharma's Annapurna Post English Edition Interview

Friday, Sep 30, 2016Exclusive interview with distinguished poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma

http://annapurnapost.com/en/news/87

“Nepal is a nation born out of the breath of poets/ translators.” Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator.

He has published nine poetry collections including, Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2012), Nepal Trilogy, Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with German photographer, Andreas Stimm, Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009), and recently a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.

Two books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) just appeared in French and Spanish respectively.
Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places including Poetry Café, London, Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry, Belfast, New York University, New York, Western Writers’ Center, Galway, Bowery Poetry Place, New York, The Kring, Amsterdam, P.E.N. Paris, Knox College, Illinois, Whittier College, California, Baruch College, New York, WB Yeats’ Center, Sligo, Gustav Stressemann Institute, Bonn, Rubin Museum, New York, Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, The Guardian Newsroom, London, Trois Rivieres Poetry Festival, Quebec, Arnofini, Bristol, Borders, London, Slovenian Book Days, Ljubljana, Royal Society of Dramatic Arts, London, Gunter Grass House, Bremen, GTZ, Kathmandu, Ruigoord, Amsterdam, Nehru Center, London, Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Indian International Center, New Delhi, and Villa Serbelloni, Italy.

He has held a workshop in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California and New York University, New York.

His works have appeared in Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, Indian Literature, Irish Pages, Delo, Omega, Howling Dog Press, Exiled Ink, Iton77, Little Magazine, The Telegraph, Indian Express and Asiaweek.

Born in Nakodar, Punjab and educated at Baring Union Christian College, Batala and later at Rajasthan University, Jaipur, Yuyutsu remained active in the literary circles of Rajasthan and acted in plays by Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. Later he taught at various campuses of Punjab University, and Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.

The Library of Congress has nominated his recent book of Nepali translations entitled Roaring Recitals; Five Nepali Poets as Best Book of the Year 2001 from Asia under the Program, A World of Books International Perspectives.

Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. He just published his nonfiction, Annapurnas & Stains of Blood: Life, Travel and Writing a Page of Snow, (Nirala, 2010) and completed his first novel.

Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

More: www.yuyutsu.de
www.niralapublications.com

1) What inspired you to write your first poem? Since then what has been
your inspiration?

Yuyu: My childhood upbringing in my grandfather’s house inspired me to write. I was adopted by my grandfather as he had no son, only three daughters. My grandfather was a learned person and had several books all around me from my early childhood. Also, the deeply religious atmosphere in my family influenced me immensely. The oral traditions of Bhakti poets left an indelible impact on my life.

2) Does Poetry come to you naturally? How you define Poetry?

Yuyu: Yes, it’s like shaman’s drum, something concrete has to shake me into higher realms of consciousness.

3) Can Poetry be learned, improved and taught? Is Poetry a skill or talent reserved for few people?

Yuyu: No, poetry cannot be taught, it has to be there in your blood and bones, In Asia, we have this great Guru tradition. But a Guru can only evoke the Muse lurching in the dark corner of the mind of the poet to be…

4) Do you think Poets are Mad?

Yuyu: In a special way, yes. And also as Shelley said ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of the world.

Nepal always had the scourge of tyrants and ruthless despots ravaging the innocence of the innocent people. Being on the edge of the world, the democracy came quite late, in 1990 only. Today in the new democratic set-up, with the ongoing struggle for a just political system without losing past glory of age-long traditions, a writer’s role becomes extremely delicate as well as intriguing.

5) In your lifetime career what obstacles and encouragements you’ve encountered? Who/What has been your source of motivation to continue writing poetry?

Yuyu: Kabir says if you want to be a poet, first put your house on fire and come with me and be a poet. Writing poetry is a very formidable job, so a poet should be prepared for the worst. Especially in the Indian subcontinent where buying poetry is not a norm, it’s very frustrating. Poets are elevated to unimaginable heights but refused any financial support.

My family, especially my late mother, remains a constant source of inspiration for me to write. I remember when my first book of poems, A Prayer In Daylight appeared and I went to present first copy of the book to my mother, she took the book, touched it to her forehead and went to the family shrine to place it before the god’s image. She was so very proud my vocation as a poet.

6) How’s the scenario of English Poetry in Nepal? Do you see a good future?

Yuyu: We have good poets coming up, the scene is vibrant and diverse.

7) Can Poets writing in English contribute to Nepalese society, culture, peace et al? What’s the role of an English-writing poet in a country like Nepal?

Yuyu: Nepal is a nation born out of the breath of poets / translators.

Poets have always played a vital role in shaping policy in Nepal. I find poets here in Nepal writing in many languages , including English, serving the Muse very effectively.

8) Who’s your favorite poet and books that have touched you?

Yuyu: I am a great admirer of Nepali poet Gopal Prasad Rimal. Kabir and several other Bhakti poets have touched me hugely. Contemporary Indian poet Jayanta Mahapatra has also remained a significant influence.

9) What’s your message to the future poets of Nepal?

Yuyu: Listen to the sound of your heart and try to weave a song out of it.

10) Lastly, can you name one poem of yours that you would consider the best of all?

Yuyu: Yes, I have a few favorites. But wherever I go I always begin with my poem ‘Mules ‘from my book, Annapurna Poems as the poem is central to the lives of people struggling for a bare survival in the High Himalayas. But I often conclude my readings with “Space Cake, Amsterdam’ which gives my audiences a peep into my later work coming from my travels in Europe and North America.

–Spring, 2012
West Village, New York City

American poet Ruth Danon's Scintillating Amazon Review of Yuyutsu Sharma's new book, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

 A Wanderer in the City, September 29, 2016

By 

ruth danon

This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)

Whenever Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma greets anyone, he says “Namaste” and gives the accompanying bow with hands folded in front of his heart. “Namaste” means “I bow to the god in you” and one might say that to write poetry is, for this writer, an endless act of bowing to the indwelling holiness of everything in the universe.

At his master class at NYU, Yuyu said, to be a poet you must set your house on fire and walk away. I think that this speaks to the urgency of the poetic vocation in his own life. When he was a child, his father, who had had a religious conversion, wanted to give him away to a group of austere monks. The monks knew better and told his father to send him to school.

Because of the wisdom of the monks he was able to become a great poet and a great trekker and wanderer throughout the world. His poems speak to a wonder and curiosity born out of his love of this world and the experiences it offers. You will hear in his work an eclectic set of references – Lorca, the Himalayas, Amsterdam, the fish sold in a market in New York. The world presents to him an amazing array of rich experience and that, filtered through wonder and humility, and immense generosity, yields a poetry of wonder an surprise. You will hear lists and repetitions – echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg yes but also echoes of mountain streams and strange gods, brought together in a voice full and fully his own and full of humor generosity, and wisdom.

In his book, A Blizzard in My Bones, Sharma brings this background and sensibility to the city he claims as a second home. Reviewers have remarked on the mixing of east and west and surely that’s here – even in the language as Hindi or Nepali words are made to rhyme with English ones. The book presents a man, haunted by the loss of his mother, who travels to New York, post 9-11 and post- Sandy, hoping to find the literary landscape of this city – Whitman, Lorca, Leonard Cohen are some of his heroes. And he does – he finds Brooklyn and the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel. But he also finds a city defined by commercial brand names and homeless people, a city of people suffering from loneliness and isolation. He carries with him the memory of the sacred relationship with nature that he experienced in the Himalayas and he carries this as he wanders the city that he loves and finds dismaying and in many ways alienating. The universal erotic offers some relief, but that sphere, too, is tinged with the isolation that seems so poignant to someone whose culture operates in a more communal way. Sharma’s gift is to see all this and yet to find the sublime in “the holy and the broken.” (pace, Leonard Cohen.) The poems in A Blizzard in My Bones offer a glimpse of New York City that reveals its fissures and its glories. Those of us who live in the city can be grateful for such illumination.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2M5RFJGHZ88C8/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729

Dr. Anne Fritiz on Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems: An Amazon Review

 Words clearer than pictures, September 14, 2016

By 

Dr A M Fritz

Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)

Sometimes words are clearer than images.
In Quaking Cantos, earth shattering words reflect the shattering of a world.
Yuytsu's poems are beautiful and terrible, and reach your core.
If you want to understand rather than just read or hear about the Nepal earthquake, then this slim volume is a must read.
I have read them, a few at a time, and I am still trembling

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2OD4HHLI2PDKX/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818

A fabulous, full-length Amazon Review of Quaking Cantos by British poet, Maria Heath Beckett

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3DCNZXR74EEJ1/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818

 Quaking Cantos, September 13, 2016

By 

Maria HB

This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)

Yuyutsu Sharma opens his collection in 'Twisted Galaxies' with a depiction of recovering ‘fragments of sleep.’ and this image together with the mention of the frogs and the cicadas seems like a waking up out of the terrible trauma which has ravaged Nepal in the form of the recent earthquakes. We are taken swiftly into the experience of the narrator, through the first person wakening, an image of vulnerability, contrasted with powerful verbs and phrases chosen to describe the destructive processes of the earthquake, such as ‘punctured', ‘fractured’, ‘sullied earth’... ‘debased glaciers’, ‘beguiled stars’ and ‘twisted galaxies’ , details which effectively evoke a palpable tension, and an image of traumatised nature. In general, dynamic verbs are used throughout the text to strong effect, enabling a honing down of embellishment, whilst preserving the vivid emotions at play. The careful selection of specific instead of general event also ensures that the poet creates dramatic tension through the particular instead of the vague.

In the following poem, 'Head Piece', we start to picture the local dwelling places, the focus on materials adding significant detail, redolent of building work and effort largely destroyed. We read about the ‘terracotta and wooden struts, sliced out of a single tree,’ for example, and the ‘timeless wooden pagoda,’ building and fabric suddenly unstable, fragile, uncertain, as we read about the ‘mad dash’ out from the canopy, the narrator identified then with an ant, which reminds me of Gregor waking up as an insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis; the transformation here is nature at nature's hand, but a similar sense, the way I see it, of loss of control and the strangeness of the spatial sense of body is evoked.

I had not known what to expect when I first heard about Yuyu’s poems about the earthquake, but any doubts about how close this poet felt the trauma of this natural catastrophe is clarified in 'Glint,' a visceral description of a victim’s humility in death. Here we have a vocabulary set hinging on movement, ‘bundled’, ‘wounded’, ‘shackled’ and ‘cuffed’, ‘shuddering’ and ‘derange’, lexical choices personifying the natural onslaught in terms of an aggressor humiliating the victim into a loss of both physical and psychic structure. The reader comprehends here, the full extent to which the events have traversed this poet, leaving a palpable, intense trace, of the sheer shock that lays somewhere beyond, hinted at by words of such force. The language seems chosen for rhythmic, syncopated effect as well as meaning and this surely, is partly how the poem succeeds to catalyse in us an actual physical experience of the earthquake, conveyed here much like an attack.

The collection moves on, and I must leave the works to be discovered by the readers for themselves, but I will highlight a few further themes:
Suffering and vulnerability:
In 'Nipple' we are faced with an unflinching portrays of human vulnerability in the form of a baby searching, vainly, for it’s mother’s breast, but finds only earth’s ‘cold chest’. This theme continues, with the death of ‘grandma’ on the ‘grassy ground’ which finds the narrator here in standing in tears beneath the sky, and it seems here as if all emotion and sorrow is somehow exposed by the disaster that has torn through the usual protective enclaves of home, custom and form. The poet draws the reader’s attention to both the raw and spontaneous downfall of tears, and the paradoxical, ‘frozen caverns’ of his eyes, the narrator here evidently stunned with loss and grief.

Portrayals of the sheer defencelessness of building and community follow, the prayers of priest, hopeful to the last, no way to deflect the destructive course of nature. Later, the image of ‘smashed brass bells, guilt of possessing tongues that kept millions captive to atrocious citadels’ … continues the theme of the transience of religion and custom in the face of such disaster. The houses like wrestlers flopping and ‘prostrate’ is a further image of the vanquishing of building and home.

The theme of devastation is counter-pointed with the effort shown at recovering routines, by the market traders for example, in 'Reeking Armpits', selling their wares, and in close writing about the courage shown amongst villagers. We feel by that point in the book, that we need that sense of relief and recovery and these poems are well placed, to reflect the delay, patience and fortitude required in the restoration of their lives. The recounted survival of a nine month old baby is a poignant detail the reader will find gives some comfort after the appalling events.


Quaking Cantos - an impassioned response to the earthquakes in his native country and place of residence for half of every year.
A genuine, heartfelt response that spares no pain, but tells it as it was, neither pandering to an over sensitive reader by lessening the force, nor overdoing his recount to the point of over indulgence. This is where poetry as document really works, in honing into the specific detail that struck a real chord with the poet. The broad-sweep is for the newscaster, whereas the poignant close focus is for the writer who walks amongst the remains and writes it down in their own, unschooled words; for how can anyone ever be prepared for such an event? And where find literary precedent or source material or guiding inspiration? There may be none, and at times like this it is the way that the heartbeats or the sound of your own footfall that is the key to the language found. The earthquake takes the poet and the reader into an experience beyond the interpretative world of today’s media and into the raw perception of a poet amongst ruins and slow and gradual recovery.


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Yuyutsu Sharma's Nepal weekly interview

Online Version of Yuyutsu Sharma's Nepal weekly interview
http://nepal.ekantipur.com/news/2016-09-12/20160912173804.html

Distinguished Nepalese literary columnist, Raj Kumar Baniya on Yuyutsu Sharma's travels in leading Nepali language weekly magazine, "Nepal"

Distinguished Nepalese literary columnist, Raj Kumar Baniya on Yuyutus Sharma's travels in leading Nepali language weekly magazine, "Nepal"

http://nepal.ekantipur.com/

Refreshing Amazon review of Quaking Cantos: Nepal by American Poet Doreen Deutsch Spungin

Quaking Cantos, September 8, 2016 https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500818 By  Doreen D. Spungin This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback) Yuyutsu Sharma ’s Quaking Cantos leaves me in awe. How is the poet able to get so deeply inside this horrific natural disaster and make it become the reader’s personal experience? How is he able to write with tenderness and beauty, as well as with anguish and sadness, painting with his own inimitable brush of words and observations what certainly was tearing at his own heart.? Sharma writes of the destruction as he describes what he has seen-- “A lamb Tethered to an electric pole…” from Quake Relief, a poem in which the word, ‘tug’ is used often. And tug is what it does to this reader’s heart. The simple lamb becomes symbolic, its need for survival after the quake representing all of Nepal. And in Seven Things that Caused the Quakes, Sharma touches on traditional beliefs and superstitions and takes us to the 21st century’s newest gods: “the earth changed side in her sleep…” “But they did not listen lost as they were in their virtual worlds, iPads, iPhone Facebook, Twitter. They killed it and they threw it in the Sunkosi river…” “From its insulted eyes it shot a curse, bringing the mountains upside down…” And from the Epilogue, 3, we return to the animal world, “a dead horse being pulled uphill by a muscular mountain man.” And in 8, from the Epilogue, this stunning question: “On whose side are you, poet?” These are poems that will put you beside the poet as he surveys the destruction and seeks words to convey his emotions. Read this book and discover how successfully he has done so.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3VMTFROM1TSU/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

Distinguished American Poet David Austell's Review of A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, by Yuyutsu Sharma

A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, by Yuyutsu Sharma

-a brief background and review by Dr. David Austell, Columbia University

The poetic vision of Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma of Kathmandu is a dream-space, a crux-point of mysterious intersections and collisions. His intellectual focal point has often been his homeland of Nepal with its profound cultural heritage and sheer natural wonder, and Nepal has been the subject of much of his powerful poetry, for example as exhibited in his majestic Annapurna Poems. It is his fascination with the pathos of culture-collision, whether in recounting an after-party in The Netherlands (Space Cake Amsterdam), or in meeting the illiterate mother of a young Gurkha who has died on a hillside battlefield in Afghanistan, that has been a hallmark of Yuyu’s poetry. It is his “literary tectonics” that most distinguish his work: the brutal shock of human and animal confrontation with the Himalayas, and the sometimes marvelous, sometimes crushing collisions that occur between peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities, castes, and countries. His literary tectonics further describe the horror of earthquake devastation, and the collapsing human depths and burgeoning heights caused by catastrophe. Never far away in Yuyu’s writing are the luminous mysteries and intimidating wildness of nature at earth’s highest altitudes in the Himalayas:

I am utterly alone,
stuck on the last mountain of the world,
And beyond me just one more mountain
where they say a deity lives
guarding a tiny turquoise lake.
And thereafter nothing but
a realm of melting snows
where the souls of the gods live.

-from "Little Paradise Lodge”

There is an exoticism overlaying Yuyu’s work that is especially captivating (and best experienced in his live readings of the poems); from a Westerner’s perspective, it may at first seem as if Hilton’s Lost Horizon had ballooned into a literary framework, and Yuyu’s verses to new revelations of Shangri-La. Don’t be fooled. There is no escapism here, since we’re immediately faced with the versed reality of the often desperate plight of his homeland, the suffering of people and animals, the sounds of Kathmandu, a city balancing on the knife-edge of ecological and political disaster.

The continuation of his poetic vision is A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, Yuyu’s deeply moving new collection, and a remarkable addition to modern urban literature. The context of the poems has moved beyond Anapurna and away from Europe to that perhaps most exotic of all places, New York City. Here every collision and intersection that can be imagined occurs, often at once it seems, and it is only the mind of a poet who has become in many ways an expatriate New Yorker who might make contemporary sense of the ensuing emotional and artistic melee.

It is not any single focal point, however, or even the combination of three focal points, that make this new poetry so powerful; but rather the fact that the verse is as profoundly multicultural in its perspectives and sensibilities as the city itself. In essence, the verse is filtered through the sensibilities of a devout practitioner of Hinduism. It is Nepal and Hinduism and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Greenwich Village drawn together in a new Space Cake: Amsterdam, but centered in the concrete and steel heights of Metropolis. This is New York City in the early 21st century as measured through the psyche of a mystified expatriate priest-intellectual; and it is quite simply wonderful artistry.

Fantastic review of A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems by Karen Herceg

Top Customer Reviews

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729

5.0 out of 5 starsYuyutsu Sharma's Fabulous New York Poems

By Karen Herceg on August 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems
allows us to see New York City with new eyes of wonder
as can only be done by someone who is not a native.
With great compassion, he adopts the city with all its flaws and the marvel of its history. 

Iconic images become the vehicle for personal metaphor and examination. 

He explores how readily we can lose ourselves in a city 

so imprinted with the stories of millions yet retain our own personal connections to it. 

With exquisite poetic sensibility he exhibits how so many personalities
add to the collective persona of the city itself. New York becomes an archetypal symbol
 paradigmatic of, and yet distinct from, other places on earth. 

Sharma’s verse moves us from the personal 

to the universal experience without sacrificing
the distinctive nuances of such a complex metropolis 

or a single person’s contribution within its frequently impersonal presence. 

He refines its ubiquity down to the sensibility of a village, 

underlying the great bond of similarities we all share.

Yuyutsu Sharma is a treasure as a person and as a writer. 

His poetry invites trans-cultural participation
and a human connection through its global appeal.

He is an artist who works to promote all artists
who endeavor to create at their highest potential.

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Yuyutsu Sharma's Space Cake, Amsterdam's Amazon Review by European poet, Agnes Marton

 A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube, August 26, 2016

By 

Agnes Marton poet

This review is from: Space Cake, Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America (Paperback)

Yuyutsu Sharma is Mona Lisa’s hallucinatory lover, saying Namaste (‘I salute the soul of God that is within you’) (Mona Lisa Drunk). A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube (Miles on the Tube). A cityhopper who is not at all a tourist, who is at home everywhere, exploring urban fields through his Himalayan gaze. The master of observation, of detail, of compassion.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1TK0PIRVS3UHT/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500591&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

A review of Yuyutsu Sharma's A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems" from Agnes Marton

 Multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the city, August 26, 2016

By 

Agnes Marton poet

This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)

Yuyutsu Sharma’s New York poems are full of collisions and intersections, and his verse itself is also multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the city:

“Meager, skimpy, bloodless,

punching the city’s famed roaches

my legs clanging, wheeling mantras

of angry and drunken avatars,

my breaths measuring menus

of Fast Food takeaways

like curses of the demented

on shaky subway tracks”

(The Scream, Subway Avatars)

and fractions of the everyday sightseeing of an expat:

“The day you stop taking the free

Staten Island Ferry to click a perfect shot

of the Statue of Liberty,

or stop visiting Times Square at night

and forget to find a way out of its labyrinth (…)

You are a New Yorker.”

(You are a New Yorker)

It’s glorious contemporary urban poetry where sometimes traces of pastoral elegy can be found, sometimes magic realism, sometimes the individual’s concerns of global matters, sometimes eroticism, sometimes the mythology of Sufi saints… Most often all of these together in harmony.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QDCTZW38FH1H/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

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Amazon Review of Quaking Cantos; Nepal Earthquake Poems by Brooklyn-based poet Patricia Carragon

 Nepal's Poet Writes About the Devastation of His Homeland, August 25, 2016

By 

Patricia Carragon

This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)

Yuyutsu Sharma's "Quaking Cantos" is a painful recollection of the earthquake in Nepal. When you read the lines, you feel the emotion of the poet as he goes into graphic details of the horror of death and devastation. When you read the lines, you sense that the gods were communicating with Sharma, helping him find the courage to write each word. Each poem is like a beautiful prayer. Sharma is a guru who prays for the healing of his homeland. But this is also a wake-up call for all of us. The earth is hurting and she is in pain. We need to stop the pillaging and pollution. We need to show respect for Mother Earth and her living creatives if we are to survive into the next century.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1CM4YIK99O13N/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

A Good Reads review of Quaking Cantos and Blizzard in my Bones by Asails F

Asails F's Reviews > A Blizzard in my Bones

Want to Read

My rating:

[ 1 of 5 stars ]2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars

A Blizzard in my Bones 

by Yuyutsu Sharma (Goodreads Author) 

Asails F's review

Apr 16, 2016

it was amazing

Read from March 18 to 28, 2016

I can not review A Blizzard in my Bones. I could not possibly review A Blizzard in my Bones before reading the Quaking Cantos.

The two books do not exist without the other and each left alone would be like a sailboat in irons. One a tragedy of human nature, from an intellect honed by old Asian culture; the other footed endlessly on the tripe on New York City. But both, written in a time of massive upheaval: the hurricane and earthquake.

The mighty Gurka houses ripped apart, Ganesha laughing, Buddha's denial, Nath's shrine, Samādhi sprung open, Garuda and Vishnu unleashing. The vice wide open in the market and the mass like that of Whitman's' humanity. Then all gods slammed into New York City's: fall of the trade towers, sordid New York streets with it's preyed apon homeless, the subway rider removing and reapplying her poison, and the opulent malls and coffee shops littering the streets that offer no hope or quiet reprieve.

The books, not black and white and, the cultures not ultimately different; the veranda, the same for all. Together the books slap your face in the words of two different cultures and show that we are one.

A New York City and Nepal, a land of the Indians and peopled by the same. One should not leave one book for the other. The stories continue from our earliest humanity.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1595083520?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Yuyu's Summit, An Amazon Review of Annapurna Poems by Robert Scotto

 yuyu's summit, December 28, 2012

By 

Robert M. Scotto

This review is from: Annapurna Poems (Paperback)

The summit, if you will pardon the pun, of Yuyutsu Sharma's distinguished career, Annapurna Poems both continues and expands the territory that he has uniquely claimed as his own. Writing complex poetry about an enigmatic, even exotic, world in English, he has brought Shanga-La, in its glory and its gritty reality, to the rest of the world. Not everyone will agree on a particular favorite poem, so instead let me recommend that you read them all, slowly and carefully, and enter an unfamiliar world with an eloquent, sensitive guide.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2LDSCQBZ7B42A/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500478&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

An Amazon Customer review of Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems by Cathy Brown

Powerful prose, August 21, 2016 By  Cathy Brown This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover) Yuyutsu Sharma perfectly captures the dichotomy of being a Nepal native in New York: the strangeness, the wonder, the familiarity and feeling at home. If at all possible, catch him reading his work: it's a sublime, humbling experience. https://www.amazon.com/review/R3MG87Z4BXQXQU/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

Amazon Customer Review of Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems

 Amazing imagery and emotion comes through, August 21, 2016

By 

Amazon Customer

This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)

Amazing imagery and emotion comes through. When I read from this book I feel like I am transported somewhere beyond my daily reality. If you haven't picked this up yet get it now. An even bigger treat is to hear Sharma rend them as they were meant to be heard. If he is reading somewhere near you please go see him. Until then fall in love with his imagery and haunting words.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RBMDVK68JMW7T/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

Recent Amazon Reviews of A Blizzard in my Bones; New York Poems

 A fiery poet with wanderlust in his soul, Yuyu ..., May 8, 2016

By 

Carolyn Wells

A fiery poet with wanderlust in his soul, Yuyu Ram Dass combines flavors of East and West,
juxtaposes the modern with antiquity with underlying motif of deep spirituality. A world traveler, his poetry
describes adventure from the lower east side of New York to Katmandu, from Amsterdam and back to
the mythical lore of the Himalayas, a language rich in words as it is in metaphor. He is a poet of our times.

 Poet in New York, August 8, 2016

By 

Charles Joy

With a cosmopolitan perspective grounded in South Asian heritage, Yuyutsu Sharma brings his clear-eyed imagination and concise voice to a popular topic, New York City. Enjoy his sensuous adventures as this accomplished poet inhabits a city of his, and our, dreams.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729

Yuyutsu Sharma to read at Cleveland's most legendary bookstore, Mac's Backs- Books on Coventry tomorrow evening

http://www.macsbacks.com/

YUYUTSU SHARMA

Yuyutsu Sharma will read at Mac's followed by an open mic on Wednesday, July 13th at 7 p.m.

Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator. He has just published Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, his response to the devastating 2015 Nepalase earthquake and the ensuing cultural disaster in his homeland.

He has published nine poetry collections including, Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in my Bones, (2014), Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2012), Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (2009, Indian reprint 2014) and Annapurna Poems, 2008, Reprint, 2012).
Yuyutsu also brought out a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled, Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New (2006) and a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual edition, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.

Event date: 

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Event address: 

1820 Coventry Rd.

Cleveland Heights, OH 44118