Comments about poetry
"Group Portrait is a very solid and pleasurable account of a life, domestic or otherwise. A significant step forward from First offence, already quite good on its own." Laurence Goldstein, Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review
"The poems (are) attractively autobiographical, free from posturing, refreshingly untortured in their attitudes and their language." Craig Raine
"First Offence (is) an excellent collection of poems, always serious and sometimes profound. The range of images is particularly attractive, evoking the poet's environment with sharp, critical perceptions. There are many ironic touches, passionate moments disciplined into clear, economical statements... and a frequent playfulness that I find altogether charming. Nissim Ezekiel
"While others were loudly seeking a usable past, it now appears that the Bombay poets in defiantly proclaiming themselves citizens of the modern world and its discontents were actually the ones renewing a heritage and bringing it up to date. It has taken Group Portrait to reveal this paradox" Bruce King
The poems in this volume are marked by toughness and an expressive density. Peeradina's poetry conveys a masculine yet thoroughly unpatronizing view of women in the context of modern, urban India. An exceptionally graphic view of the heady tumult of living in the suburbs of a metropolis like Bombay gives the lives depicted in these poems a particular immediacy and appeal. Gieve Patel
"The tropes of genre painting are appropriate. Of them all, the trope of the still life is most fitting. The stillness is not so much that of a Vermeer room, as that of one of those Flemish arrangement of flowers, sugar cubes, fruits, and the creeping beetle of time. Group Portrait navigates between the autobiographer's temptation to heighten and monumentalize every obsessional detail, and the ironist's bracing, sardonic counterpoint. The cinema and its characteristic usages turn up in strange ways in the quality of some of the escape fantasies and in the track and pan shots that determine the sequences effortlessly." Ranjit Hoskote
"Peeradina's use of language is spare, even laconic, and his style very often tangential. Feeling is finely honed by craftsmanship, and filtered through his aesthetic sensibility." Indu K. Mallah
"Before Saleem Peeradina published his first book of poems, First Offence, in 1980, he was known in poetry circles for editing a definitive anthology of Indo-English poetry. His poem, 'Bandra’, in the same anthology marked him out as a poet to watch out for." Satan Rodrigues
"The nine poems in 'Family Mirror' constitute both a celebration and an indictment of the nuclear family as a social institution..seen against the invisible violence of the claustrophobic living spaces in our society." E.V. Ramakrishnan
"Peeradina's sensibility is too delicate for any hammer blows. His is the low-key act: put a finger on the texture of life and bring it alive in words. His craft is good and his voice a welcome one." Tarun Tejpal, India Today
"Peeradina's greatest gift is his ability to visualize a situation or scene in strong, concrete images. It is as a painter, as a collector of living 'breathing' images, that Peeradina succeeds best in his poetry." Jai Dev, Journal of South Asian Literature
"The vignettes in the four poems in section two (of First Offence) lack the spice of savage humor that livens section one's more aggressive pieces. Here is verbal witchcraft at its best." Shailaja Ganguly The Times of India
"Group Portrait is a very solid and pleasurable account of a life, domestic or otherwise. A significant step forward from First offence, already quite good on its own." Laurence Goldstein, Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review
"The poems (are) attractively autobiographical, free from posturing, refreshingly untortured in their attitudes and their language." Craig Raine
"First Offence (is) an excellent collection of poems, always serious and sometimes profound. The range of images is particularly attractive, evoking the poet's environment with sharp, critical perceptions. There are many ironic touches, passionate moments disciplined into clear, economical statements... and a frequent playfulness that I find altogether charming. Nissim Ezekiel
"While others were loudly seeking a usable past, it now appears that the Bombay poets in defiantly proclaiming themselves citizens of the modern world and its discontents were actually the ones renewing a heritage and bringing it up to date. It has taken Group Portrait to reveal this paradox" Bruce King
The poems in this volume are marked by toughness and an expressive density. Peeradina's poetry conveys a masculine yet thoroughly unpatronizing view of women in the context of modern, urban India. An exceptionally graphic view of the heady tumult of living in the suburbs of a metropolis like Bombay gives the lives depicted in these poems a particular immediacy and appeal. Gieve Patel
"The tropes of genre painting are appropriate. Of them all, the trope of the still life is most fitting. The stillness is not so much that of a Vermeer room, as that of one of those Flemish arrangement of flowers, sugar cubes, fruits, and the creeping beetle of time. Group Portrait navigates between the autobiographer's temptation to heighten and monumentalize every obsessional detail, and the ironist's bracing, sardonic counterpoint. The cinema and its characteristic usages turn up in strange ways in the quality of some of the escape fantasies and in the track and pan shots that determine the sequences effortlessly." Ranjit Hoskote
"Peeradina's use of language is spare, even laconic, and his style very often tangential. Feeling is finely honed by craftsmanship, and filtered through his aesthetic sensibility." Indu K. Mallah
"Before Saleem Peeradina published his first book of poems, First Offence, in 1980, he was known in poetry circles for editing a definitive anthology of Indo-English poetry. His poem, 'Bandra’, in the same anthology marked him out as a poet to watch out for." Satan Rodrigues
"The nine poems in 'Family Mirror' constitute both a celebration and an indictment of the nuclear family as a social institution..seen against the invisible violence of the claustrophobic living spaces in our society." E.V. Ramakrishnan
"Peeradina's sensibility is too delicate for any hammer blows. His is the low-key act: put a finger on the texture of life and bring it alive in words. His craft is good and his voice a welcome one." Tarun Tejpal, India Today
"Peeradina's greatest gift is his ability to visualize a situation or scene in strong, concrete images. It is as a painter, as a collector of living 'breathing' images, that Peeradina succeeds best in his poetry." Jai Dev, Journal of South Asian Literature
"The vignettes in the four poems in section two (of First Offence) lack the spice of savage humor that livens section one's more aggressive pieces. Here is verbal witchcraft at its best." Shailaja Ganguly The Times of India
In this new collection, his fourth, Saleem Peeradina delves
deep into some vital concerns of contemporary life: the east-west dichotomy,
the problem of migrancy, of Otherness, of splitting selves and intimate
estrangements, the dynamics of relationships, and the creation of a liminal
space in which he dwells as high wire artist. All handled in a detached,
wry, satirical, lyrical, and humorous fashion.
Clearly, this is a poetry of fusion as Peeradina deftly welds poetry with philosophy, his own lyrics with Hindi film songs expressing anguish, yearning, longing, and distilled pain, unfolding from fantastic metaphor to metaphor like a flower does in a secret heliotropism.
Similarly, Peeradina’s kinetically charged landscapes -- real, painterly, imaginary -- resplendent with bright images are rendered in a language that is sure of itself, creating a series of radiantly imagined poems. Additionally, media topography comes in for playful and ironic treatment.
Reshma Aquil, author of, Sleeping Wind, Ethos Books ( 2001).
* * *
The poems in this collection give us penetratingly imagined natural and urban landscapes in which human figures move and act with grace, sorrow, surprise, and humility. The poet’s eye is piercing, his language exquisitely lucid and dynamic. The visions he frames for us evoke scenes that range across 19th century Japan, contemporary India and the United States, urban squalor, Himalayan mountains, and Arctic skies. Paintings bleed into lived reality, art and life mingle, fixed and constructed moments become unfixed and flow into the rhythms of people longing, hoping, desiring, or simply contemplating.
“He was everywhere. He missed nothing”— in these lines by Peeradina to describe a Japanese artist, he might just as well have been speaking about himself.
--Rajini Srikanth, author of , The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and The Idea
of America (2004).
Clearly, this is a poetry of fusion as Peeradina deftly welds poetry with philosophy, his own lyrics with Hindi film songs expressing anguish, yearning, longing, and distilled pain, unfolding from fantastic metaphor to metaphor like a flower does in a secret heliotropism.
Similarly, Peeradina’s kinetically charged landscapes -- real, painterly, imaginary -- resplendent with bright images are rendered in a language that is sure of itself, creating a series of radiantly imagined poems. Additionally, media topography comes in for playful and ironic treatment.
Reshma Aquil, author of, Sleeping Wind, Ethos Books ( 2001).
* * *
The poems in this collection give us penetratingly imagined natural and urban landscapes in which human figures move and act with grace, sorrow, surprise, and humility. The poet’s eye is piercing, his language exquisitely lucid and dynamic. The visions he frames for us evoke scenes that range across 19th century Japan, contemporary India and the United States, urban squalor, Himalayan mountains, and Arctic skies. Paintings bleed into lived reality, art and life mingle, fixed and constructed moments become unfixed and flow into the rhythms of people longing, hoping, desiring, or simply contemplating.
“He was everywhere. He missed nothing”— in these lines by Peeradina to describe a Japanese artist, he might just as well have been speaking about himself.
--Rajini Srikanth, author of , The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and The Idea
of America (2004).