Book Review: Now a poem Now a forest by Paresh Tiwari
2 min read
Ankush Banerjee, a Delhi-based poet, researcher, and Naval Officer reviews Paresh Tiwari’s poetry collection, Now a poem Now a forest (Red River, 2022) and calls it an exquisite reimagining of (Poetic) form.
- Publisher: Red River Press, New Delhi
- Publishing Date: May 2022
- ISBN: 978-93-92494-01-7
- Pages: 91
- Price: INR 299.00/ USD 9.99
“They have escaped burnt manuscripts and bombed libraries. Their
bellies a bottomless pit of hunger, feet a cold trail of blood.”
From ‘My Poems are Refugees’ (p.85)
In an online interview, Paresh Tiwari describes himself as a “writer, poet, and cartoonist in the body of an Electrical engineer”. Poet, cartoonist, and engineer – it’s an intriguing combination (it merits attention that as a poet, he has been published widely in the genre of Japanese poetry, especially the haiku and haibun). On closer scrutiny though, one realises these callings are not so different – each requires subtly working on or with delicate things – imagine an electrical engineer manipulating thin wires of a small circuit, a cartoonist’s 2B pencil finely slicing white spaces on paper, or a (haiku) poet hard at work, chiselling exquisite sets of 5-7-5s. An editor of two anthologies, and author of two full-length poetry collections, Paresh Tiwari has been around for a while, assiduously working with the Japanese forms of haiku and haibun. In his third full-length collection of poems, now a poem now a forest, he brings a mature aesthetic vision to fashion a unique poetic diction, which illustrates to us, in poem after poem, what a haibun in specific, and poetry in general, can do, in hands of a skilled ‘poet-engineer’.
