Jejuri (poem)

Jejuri is a series of poems written by Indian poet Arun Kolatkar. Consisting of a sequence of 31 poems, Jejuri depicts Kolatkar's visit to Jejuri, a city in Pune, which the poet visited in 1964. It was first published in Opinion Literary Quarterly in 1974, and issued in book-form in 1976. Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977.^[1]

The poem is made up of a series of often short fragments which describe the experiences of a secular visitor to the ruins of Jejuri. It is one of the better known poems in modern Indian literature.^{[citation needed]}

Comments and criticism

Jejuri is a sequence of simple but stunningly beautiful poems and is one of the major work in modern Indian literature.^[2] The poems are remarkable for their haunting quality. However, modern critics have analysed the difficulty of readers in interpreting the Jejury poems in their proper context.^[3] Kolatkar's use of cross-cultural and trans-historical imagery posits Jejuri within a macrocosmic, global framework which forces the reader to adopt an interpretive position not determined by national or cultural preconceptions.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography

• Chaudhuri, Amit. On Strangeness in Indian Writing. The Hindu, 2005.
• Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. New York Review Books Classics, 2005. ISBN 1-59017-163-2

See also

• Indian poetry
• "Journal of Commonwealth Literature - Review of Jejury"