Icelight

Icelight is Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poems. Its speakers stand at an edge, at the rim of a life, a landscape or a world whose outlines are changing and, in places, burning. Yet they are also close to moments of sudden insight.

The poems move between bold exploration and quiet withdrawal, between doubt and belief, and between melancholy and forward drive. Hoskote opens up layers of geological time and historical memory, and he never loses sight of the dangers facing the planet. War and ecological destruction run through the book.

The collection is about transitions and departures. It accepts impermanence with eloquence, even as it faces mortality.