Ten Sentences about the Cow and Other Poems

About the book

Contents

• N.G. Unnikrishnan's Ten Sentences about the Cow is a fascinating narrative that recalls the poet's rural childhood and his experience of growing up. What could easily have become a romantic poem of nostalgic sentiments has turned here into a hilarious recounting of people and events with the figure of the cow at their core. What makes the poem unique is its tone: the poet describes people and events in a simple idiom with a kind of good-humoured detachment that makes them remote and intimate at the same time. The narrative captures village life in Kerala as it was lived a few decades ago with complete honesty while memory gives the narrative a rare legendary quality. The poem is at the same time a tribute to a vanished pastoral culture and a form of counter-folklore possible only in the modern time.
• - K. Satchidanandan

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