Anjana Basu's collection of poems - Shards of Clouds defies easy classifications. There are no neat lines to draw, no themes set in stone - the book meanders like the course of a river. Each poem pulsates in its own currents. Some with their gentle ebbs and flows, reminiscences and memories dancing a melancholy tinged waltz. While others gush forth like torrents - carrying sediments of myth and history, weaving narratives about culture and the fragility of nature and relationships. The book is a vivid canvas - every page you turn, leads you to unpredictable territory and yet you encounter familiar emotions. Basu's lyrical style has the vitality and capriciousness of beat poetry. A poem goes where it has to. It doesn't always have an agenda and you immerse in it for the sake of the journey, for the twists and turns of language, for the way words are bent to will. Pieces like Metamorphosis where "...teeny bulbs turn into butterflies at night when everyone's asleep and festivities still..." to Can you Hear the Buzz where she writes, "Flies swarm to the carcass of a cause.....till cause becomes fur of flies. All body no soul", feel tangibly contemporary. With the same effortless ease Basu's pen whisks you away to the dreamy world of Blue Slippers in Saigon. You are transported to a moment caught in time. The pages turn and you find yourself face to face with Chitrangada's dilemma - (written for Rituaparno Ghosh's Chitrangada, a note says). And you walk with Gandhi across the salt flats as he marches to "feed a nation's dream harder." In the mix of poems, some Haikus blossom like wildflowers. 

"The computer has alzheimers

Yesterday forgotten

My words lost in a cloud"

But the poem that stood out for me, the one that I keep coming back to again and again is called Vocabulary. It is surprising because of its rawness. 

"Genocide, arrogance, supremacy

such big words for intellectuals to march under

when it's the little ones that matter

life, blood, child..."