Wild Girls, Wicked Words

In 2003, a group of men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets charging the women with obscenity and immodesty. This masterclass of contemporary Tamil poetry is twice born in translation. The distinct women’s voices find their feminine awakening to the rhythm of a nuanced and rigorous English rendering by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Moving from the transgressional to the transformational, these interrogations address the arena of the body as well as the timeless preoccupations of poetry.