Central Time - Tapa dura

In Central Time, Ranjit Hoskote becomes the storyteller of a turbulent epoch. We meet Ovid and Ghalib, poets in exile or eclipse, in these poems, which are by turns elliptical, conversational and narrative. We meet painters who betray their art, and sculptors who are betrayed by theirs. Fascinated by the enigmas of time, memory and evanescence that are invokes, Hoskote addresses a range of artists including Bihzad, Magritte, Masaki Fujihata and Ranbir Kaleka. At the same time, he retains his affection for the natural world, celebrating the textures and intensities of sensous experience: the roughness of stone, the dance of light, the flowering of touch and the taste of salt and cinnamon.

Ranjit Hoskote's collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985-2005 and Die Ankunft der Vogel. His translation of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I,Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded.