Birthplace with Buried Stones

Book excerpt: "With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander's poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both everywhere and nowhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether walking a city street or reading Bashō in the Himalayas, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war, the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander's native India to New York City. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander's poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard." -- back cover.