Vanishing Acts : New and Selected Poems, 1985-2005

"Vanishing Acts" by Ranjit Hoskote, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award 2004, brings together some of his best poetry, drawn from his three published collections, along with a substantial body of new poems.

While continuing to explore the interplay between the epic, devastating sweep of historical events and an intimate, often vulnerable, self, his new poems dwell on emigrants, fugitives, interpreters, double agents - survivors who walk the fragile border between eternity and transience.

Experimenting with a variety of forms - ranging from the canticle to the cycle, the adapted sonnet to the passionate apostrophe - Hoskote expresses the anxieties and delights of a transitive self that constantly shifts location, and evokes strikingly the worlds that can open up at the edges of memory, identity and language.