The Alchemy of Nine Smiles: Nine Long Poems By Yuyutsu Sharma

 

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Red River; First Indian Edition (16 May 2024); Perfect Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎9392494815 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9392494819 Rs 295 Indian

 Aamzon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9392494815

"World renowned Himalayan poet."

—The Guardian

“Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the finest poets on Planet earth.”

—Sean Thomas Dougherty, Erie, Pa

"Yuyutsu Sharma is a United Nation of poetry with absolute integrity and honesty. The great poets W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams would applaud him. If the Lord were in the audience or classroom, he would applaud too. If you read “The Offer” and ‘You are a New Yorker” you will see his range that includes England, France, 42nd Street, the Netherlands, and Spain, the homeless stops of the imagination. He walks through water and weeds in the rivers Ganges, the Tiber, the Yangtze, and Hudson. All these rivers are part of his bloodstream. (Somehow people manage to swim and drown in his bloodstream). He doesn’t forget the Amazon or the Mississippi or the everyday steam of the black tea pot. There is a faint sweetish smell of a temple in Nepal on everything he writes. There are wild exchanges of words and ideas that abide with him.

When I say hello to him, I sing the hymn, Abide with Me.

 I don’t know the word for genius in Nepali Yuyu is a gifted Himalayan Mountain climber. If the Buddha gave fellowships, he’d grant one, perhaps two immediately to Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma."

—Stanley Moss, American poet and editor, Sheep Meadow Press

 

The poems here weave an epic narrative of the poet’s travels across continents, displaying a wide range of experiences replete with indigenous myths and legends and surreal narratives evoking agony of innocent lives torn apart by natural disasters and inhumanity of a corrupt polity. They range from his early struggle to survive as a full-time poet in the sweltering alleys of Delhi and remote Himalayan canyons to his inexorable ramblings across continents to sing songs of the innate spirituality of the high hills and humanity of the people he meets. Bold and kaleidoscopic, solemn and joyful, the poems show a grand poet at work, constructing a blazing narrative of our contemporary times. From seven epigrammatic constructs that caused the earthquakes in the Himalayas to his meditations on his beloved lake Fewa and on the Atlantic shore, the poems delve deeper into the intricacies of his travels and elements that keep a traveler alive in forlorn lands. Later poems move on to the agony of extinguished hearths, sectarian violence and innocent lives caught up in the crossfire of South Asian geopolitics. An epiphany from his childhood where a black bird came to hit his grandma’s cagey chest brings the readers to the final sequence of the nine smiles where the poet uses shamanic ecstasy and trance to bring his late mother back to life, the one who waited for his arrival in his hometown in Punjab, leading us to linger in the poet’s magical world for a very, very long time.

https://www.amazon.in/dp/9392494815

 

About the Poet

Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry.

Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Michael Graves, Brand Called You), Punjab-born, Indian poet Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage.

He is also 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.  Author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, Lost Horoscope, he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Heidelberg University, University of Ottawa, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Rubin Museum, New York, Beijing Open University, New York University and Columbia University, New York.

Yuyutsu was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate the London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.”

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

Currently, Yuyutsu is curating New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu and Himalayan Literature Festival 2024. He also edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing. More: www.yuyutsusharma.com