Lidless Eyes

By Shruti Das

The poetry of Shruti Das, from Odisha, India has reached me in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and impressed me, because they are also beautiful music to our ears and wonderful paintings to our eyes, all at once that swing us into a timeless melody.
She makes silence speak through her poems, which she has written for you, me and everyone. They are about mothers and daughters pressed between expression and silence, spoken by quiet eyes.
Some of the poems are about inequality, and social injustice, but presented in new and creative forms. The Lady of Myths tells us about the story of mankind, and the poem about mountains tells how man has been destroying our environment and molesting Mother Earth. Each poem makes us pause and think, as all poetry should be.
Daya Dissanayake,
Educationist,Writer, Activist,
Sri Lanka
I really enjoyed reading your poetry. It is gentle and profound
Rosemarie Rowley. Poet, Ireland.
Each poem is a nugget you can be proud of. They voice humanitarian concerns and are couched in passionate and precise expression. The language is chiselled to suit the feelings precisely. There are also echoes of Shakespeare and Eliot. I like the description of evening as Cleopatra stretching out on her barge in all her allure. The Song Unsung is another moving piece. I didnt realise so much poetic talent is bottled up in Shruti. Thomas Gray was right: Full many a gem of purest ray serene lies hidden
- Prof. E. Nageswara Rao, Hyderabad, India

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482848557

Shruti Das

Shruti Das is Associate professor in the P.G. Department of English, Berhampur University in Odisha, India. She is a creative writer with poetry published Nationally and Internationally and also a literary critic, writing bilingually in English and her native tongue Odia. She has participated in many National and International Seminars on English language literature and Communication skills in India and abroad. She has been published in Anthologies like The Scaling Heights from India, The Inspired Heart 2 & Inspired Heart 3 from Canada, Syndic Literary Journal, Young Men’s Perspective from US, Life as a Human online Journal to name a few. A Daughter Speaks(2013) is her first collection of poems. Many of her poems have been translated into Sinhala and have been appreciated in Sri Lanka. She is sensitive to social issues, loves to travel and to dream. She loves animals.

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Copyright © 2015 by Shruti Das.

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Contents

i. Introduction

ii. Foreword

I. Between Shapes and Frames

1. Lady of Myths

2. A Frame Somewhere

3. Diwali in the City

4. Dusk and Cattle Dust

5. Kunti – The Mother

6. Of a Dear Bard

7. Of Mountains

8. On His Birthday

9. One Day at Ground Zero

10. Retrospection

11. Wisdom

12. Searching for Mirrors

13. The Bard and the Birds

14. Silent Streets

II. Between Longing and Silence

15. Midnight Sea

16. A Little House

17. Ablution

18. Damned

19. Dance

20. Her Eyes Were Quiet

21. Indian Rain

22. Pledge by Fire

23. Wrong Number

24. Next Time a Fresh Blink

25. Dark Love

26. To Sylvia Plath

27. A Silence

28. A New Dawn

III. Between Silence and Expression

29. My Eyes

30. Between Expression and Silence

31. Domesticity

32. In Life’s Eddies

33. In Madness

34. Past Midnight

35. Anticipation

36. Imprint

37. With the Jasmine

38. Winter Winds

39. Visiting Van Gogh

40. Proselytized

41. Je Suis Charlie

For Richie,

for them who feel before they think

Introduction

I met Shruti Das at an ecocriticism conference in Cork, Ireland. Like many literary conferences, I came away with new ideas and new friends, including Shruti. She was kind enough to share with me her first collection of poems, A Daughter Speaks, one of the first collections from an Indian woman poet to address the issue of the subjugation of women in her country. Moreover, her voice in this collection has come to represent the changing gender roles in India through the strength of her distinct voice throughout the collection.

A Daughter Speaks and my conversations with Shruti enlightened me to the treatment of women in India, where the patriarchy serves to constrain and control the thoughts, movements, and lives of women,