SRIRADHA (Poems)

Ramakanta Rath (b. 1934), who writes in Oriya, is a major poet of India. The poetic persona that emerged in his early poetry expected little from life, but his despair had an undertone of irony and was expressed in an entirely new idiom. In his later poetry, Ramakanta Rath is more intense and more poignant His language, though close to everyday speech, is remarkably expressive and immediately inducts the reader into the poem’s universe. **** “I know of no other poet who has achieved so intense and profound a poem of love, a masterpiece of remorseless uncovering of the ever unfulfilled experience of erotic love that aspires to the union with the divine which lies beyond human reach in this life” –Kathleen Raine.