Read exclusive excerpts from Amlanjyoti Goswami ‘s latest poetry collection, A Different Story (Poetrywala, 2025)
My father searches a poem
For what is not there.
He wants to meet the same feeling
That comes over him sometimes
While watching the sunset
Or when talking over the phone
With an old friend.
Something like companionship, not devotion or elation
But a steady presence
A feeling born from the way things are.
He searches for a line from any poem –
Mine, yours, his, the world’s.
Looking for rhythm the way water moves a rivulet in the mountains.
He enjoys a poem like coffee
A life lived full, without regrets.
I don’t know if he will find what he is looking for.
Perhaps it is too much to ask.
Perhaps he will find the poem asking him
For a menu of options.
For someone resembling himself –
Who lives in flesh and bone.
The poem will speak from the heart
But that’s not what my father wants.
He is looking for balance
An even line you place in turgid waters
Looking for fish you cannot see.
He may find something there
Like snatches of a conversation overheard
In the train compartment, when everyone is sleeping
Or while sipping morning tea in the station
Where the train waits eternal, for a minute.
When he comes back, holding a line from the dark
We will know if he has found what he is looking for.
Perhaps the cup of tea will be enough
To steer the universe.
Perhaps the world hides inside it.
Perhaps there will be more.
For an unnamed shrine, now gone
I miss the burning flame
Candle flickering in the dark.
Who came here & why?
Here yesterday, gone today.
My prayers were answered – & when I went
To thank the shrine – it was no longer there.
All that was left – raw earth
A lamp shining by a banyan tree.
The future razed to dust.
I could not find it.
My destiny turning in circles
While wheels speed on, devoid of light.
Yet something is always left behind –
An absence perhaps, what the day will soon fill
With its list of things to do.
But something gnaws, when I think
Of the shrine now gone.
An unknown, unnamed shrine
Known only to neighbours
Who made offerings of flowers
Causing no bustle, never any trouble
Never glittering from the city’s brochures.
Not sitting on common property
To invite the ire of the municipality.
Blocking no road, to call the PWD.
But simply offering rest to a weary traveller
And sometimes, when the mood was right, assuring good health.
It did not guide the policemen with directions.
That shrine is now gone.
Small, ready to help, by the roadside
A shrine with no name or destination
Where travellers stood for a moment, before moving on.
In its place, it’s all road now
The way no longer there.
Translating Rumi
Salim bhai thinks I can translate Rumi
From Persian to Hindi
While stopping for Urdu along the way.
Yes, I reply
To his bare racks where books once lived.
I know no Persian or Urdu.
My tongues are coloured Assamese and Bangla.
My Hindi just a smattering.
Yet he believes I can do it.
All you need is a bridge
From here – all the way – to Persia.
His faith in me is touching.
A white horse spelling rain and love.
Words drizzle in my heart.
Rumi will light the world for me.
New words blaze in the new year.
Keep this in your zehn, he says
When one day Rumi comes calling.
Author’s Bio
AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI’s new book of poetry, A Different Story, has just been published by Poetrywala. He has written two widely reviewed books, River Wedding and Vital Signs, published by Poetrywala. River Wedding was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi award. Published in journals and anthologies across the world, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Penguin Vintage, Rattle and Sahitya Akademi, he is also a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. His work has appeared on street walls of Christchurch, buses in Philadelphia, exhibitions in Johannesburg and an e-gallery in Brighton. He has reviewed poetry for The Hindu, Frontline, Review 31 and Modern Poetry in Translation among others. He has read at various places, including Delhi, Mumbai, New York, Chandigarh, Boston and Bangalore. He grew up in Guwahati and lives in Delhi.
About the Book
We promise the new year – hope – and we will fill the pitcher.
We will drink sunsets of magic and we will park despair on the way.
We will leave sadness stranded by the light post, solar panelled for tomorrow.
And today will still be beautiful.
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In Amlanjyoti Goswami’s third poetry collection, A Different Story, the reader is the ‘owner of the universe’ and ‘all things bright and beautiful’. Mirroring slices of a life spent immersed in the rare solace one finds only in the arts, the poems are contemplative and bathed in the light of strange nostalgia. Ghosts wander these stanzas looking for cups of chai and simple comfort, as do crows, tired elephants and even the beloved dead.
Here, a bonesetter can right the universe if the angle agrees. A lawyer persona asks Krishna and Arjuna questions on the ethics of war and the price of human life. Karna and Kunti reflect on the quirks of destiny. But like all good poets who don’t take themselves too seriously, Amlan sprinkles levity and wit in good measure: an elusive cigarette escapes Fellini; Basho wakes up to cold tea; odes aplenty are put aside for kebabs, cucumbers, pithas and other important loves at ‘first bite’.
The words honour the space around them and when read aloud, they ring with a unique music that travels from the poet’s very own Guwahati and Dilli to faraway New York and even Banalata Sen’s Natore, resting along the way inside a Vinod Kumar Shukla poem. There are many books inside this one. Let the poems guide and glide you over traffic and terrible heat, over monuments and flowing rivers, through the many worlds they inhabit, ‘like a bird resting mid-flight’.
– Sohini Basak