Abstract
Abstract
Very few poets in the world wrote as obsessively about plant life as Shakti Chattopadhyay. Entering his writing through his biography, his life in Baharu and his moving to Calcutta, his nomadic education and professional life, his constant centrifugal desire to travel to forests in India, this chapter reads his poems closely to understand his world of philosophical botany, his obsession with roots, the autumnal forest, the privileging of leaves over flowers, the figures of the woodcutter and the gardener, the desire to enter a tree and live there, and how a tree’s giving is different from the human’s.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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