‘We do not always require the services of a time machine to travel in dramatic ways across diverse periods. Sometimes, an individual life is enough—if it is premised on a sensitive attentiveness to the transit of the years and the insistent presence of deep histories. Jayshree Misra Tripathi’s collection of poems, evocatively titled Morning Twilight, offers deeply moving testimony to such a life.
‘Tripathi’s poems are sumptuous in the experiences they relay and vibrant in the insights they offer. They invite us to visit landscapes of love, loss and remembrance, rendered with sensuous immediacy. With the poet as our guide, we cross barriers of region, continent and language, recognising ourselves in strangers met by chance and accepting the strangers who live within ourselves.
‘Along the way, Tripathi shares with us her realisation that rituals cannot always provide consolation while traditions can betray our affection. The challenge, as we refashion ourselves in the midst of turbulence, is to craft new rituals, fresh traditions. On this journey, we join the poet as she passes from a tragic knowledge of impermanence to an elegiac wisdom. Pensive and prayerful, these poems are—to quote one of Tripathi’s own lines— “Immortal memoirs etched in Gold.”‘—Ranjit Hoskote