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For thousands of years, the Indian subcontinent has proved a fertile ground for the world’s most captivating erotic love poetry, and the genius of its devotional writing harnesses great energy and mystical insight. It is in fact often hard to tell whether the poets are offering poems of spiritual longing using the garments of love poetry or writing erotic pieces in the guise of devotion. Perhaps, in a land where erotic sculptures routinely ornament its many ...
An exceptional selection of erotic poetry from ancient India, The Cane Groves of Narmada River features poems composed from the second century CE to the sixteenth century. Starting with several poems from the Prakrit anthology attributed to King Hala, the Sattasai, the book then takes in its sweep some of the most famous and enduring erotic poems composed in Sanskrit (and related vernacular traditions) by poets like Amaru, Bhavabhuti, Bhartrihari, Hemachandra and ...
Twilight Speech is a collection of essays and translations by an accomplished American poet who has spent years studying the classical poetries and poetics of India. The various writings in this book take up folklore, music and Buddhist poetics, as well as examining how these have influenced contemporary concerns, such as environmentalism and avant-garde poetry. Many of the essays are illuminated by translations, which serve as guides to the old poetries-secular ...
Deeply personal and intuitive, the literary output of the bhakti tradition moves through love and desire, agony and ecstasy, passion and devotion to transcend religion, race, and region.
Mapping bhakti literature from the first century BCE to the twentieth, this anthology covers a large swathe: the early poems to Siva, the compositions of the Alvar poets, the Virashaiva poets, the Varkaris, and the Vaishnava poets to Punjabi songs, the mystic music of the ...