Fields and Footsteps

Astonishingly, on Indian villages, this is the very first collection by an Indian who writes originally in English.

He journeys tenderly into the quiet lives, forgotten moments, and enduring emotions that make the ordinary unforgettable. Fields and Footsteps brings us close to the struggles, joys, memories, and dreams of our nation’s rural majority.

Without losing their particular character, our villages become a setting for universal experiences — work, waiting, departure, ageing, love, and loss.

Here is an invitation to pause and notice a world which, in our rapidly changing lives, we often overlook.

Fields and Footsteps offers an intimate journey.

Here is your invitation to see, in the disregarded, demeaned and ordinary, much that is beautiful, much that is nostalgic, and all that is extraordinary.

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About the author

Sonnet Mondal is the director of “Chair Poetry Evenings” – Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival, the managing editor of Verseville, and editor of the Indian section of Lyrikline – and has served as a guest editor for Words Without Borders.

Translated into twenty languages, his work includes ten books of his poems – e.g., Clamour for a Handful of Rice and An Afternoon in My Mind.

Invited to participate in the Iowa Writing Programme’s “Silk Routes Project”, and in the Almaty Writing Residency, as well as at literary festivals in more than thirty countries, he has received the Gayatri Gamarsh Memorial Award and an Award of Honour from the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Literature).

 

 

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“Elegant and clear-sighted. Aphoristic and incisive” — Steven J. Fowler, English poet and founder of the European Poetry Festival

“Poems by Sonnet Mondal are characterised by a strong meditative vein that, as in poets like Walt Whitman or Robert Frost, keep illuminating the journey of life and the abundance of our little planet” — K. Satchidanandan, Indian poet and editor

“Sonnet Mondal’s poems immerse their readers” – Christina Davis, Poet & Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, USA

“Though the poems investigate loss, yearning, and solitude, they do not forgo humor” – Catherine Barnett, editor and award winning American poet

“With daily incidents and accidents, musings and reverence, Sonnet’s poems kiss the muse of its roots, bringing to life the mystic traditions of Rumi and Kahlil Gibran”. — Elena Karina Byrne, American poet and editor