My Speaking Tongue

Sharpened, but not defined, by the author's evolving experience of motor neurone disease, these poems are meditations on - and sometimes collisions with - the limits of body, language and voice. Veering from sardonic resignation to defiance, they use a variety of forms to entangle the living in the speech of the dead (poets and others), the quotidian in the odd, the local in something altogether elsewhere. And occasionally, the poet's past, as an Indologist and translator from the Sanskrit, can be heard humming a catch to his altered self.