IRTIKA KAZI is a poet from Pune, India. She has a degree in History and Historiography from University of Pune. She studied German from Max Mueller Bhavan, Pune and currently works as a German language expert in a finance company. She is published in various magazines and anthologies like YuGen literary magazine, The Metaworker: an online literary magazine for millennials, Brown Girl magazine of Texas, Spillwords Press, Fragrance of Asia, Contemporary Literary Review India, The Literary Hatchet, Peacock Journal, Madras Courier, Savant Poetry Anthology, Sahyadri Echoes, Indian Ruminations, and The Kali Project anthology. Her poem, A Hope to Bloom, was featured on Duane Vorhees’s poetry blog. Some poems were displayed in the Museum of Goa for a poetry exhibit and featured in the 14th episode of WHEN WE MET series of UNREAD in Quarantine by Platform for Artists. Her debut book ‘stormbound’ was launched by The Quarantine Train literary group and in Anantha Festival of poetry.
Stormbound by Irtika Kazi
In her first poetry chapbook, the poet talks about her growth as a writer, how she was encouraged, amidst uncertainty and fear, by time spent in different landscapes and by exposure to evolution, to the wide array of events that took place in congruence with art and writing. The poems in this chapbook are interwoven with diverse themes ranging from emotions to social concerns and slivers of mythology.
A literary work is a powerful medium of expression when it expresses a variety of emotions by packing it in one whole where it shows the swinging moods of an artistic mind and attempts to give words to the chaos that operates internally in the mind and heart of a writer. At the same time, these works also show the complexities that operate in the lives of many and how they dictate their thoughts and expressions. An example of such a literary work is Irtika Kazi’s poetry collection, “Stormbound.” Herein, the readers would find a plethora of feelings that the poet captures in her pen and gives words to the unspoken emotions otherwise through her book.
In a latest interview with The Literature Times, she has shared more about this book. True to its title, the cover of “Stormbound” shows an image that captures the essence of the word and, at the same time, conveys the whirlwind in which the author plans to enchant the readers. Inheriting the literary genes, Kazi writes in a fluid and effortless form where she does not put any painstaking effort as her rich vocabulary comes in handy every time she plans to play with words. The readers can observe her style’s smoothness, which only makes them understand her poetic persona more closely and see the fluent style in which she writes her poetry. These are just the tip of the iceberg kind of factors that describe her style in poetry writing. The readers can anticipate and guess the potential the poet would have.
Kazi in “Stormbound” writes poetry on random subjects that connect one emotion to another. Simultaneously, it also connects the readers to their abilities to observe and appreciate how the author gives words to ideas that would otherwise find difficulty in expression. Some of her poems which are an incarnation of the unexpressed, include “On Survival,” “Memorial,” “Ramadan,” “The Koyna starts with my mother’s stride,” and many others. The collection of more than 30 poems shows the different times and junctures when the poet may have had thoughts to write on a variety of subjects and how she gives words to them. They also suggest objectivity in her manner of writing and how she tries to remain detached from the spectacle that she creates for the readers, but even though she tries, the personal element does come in as the poems are more or less based on her personal experiences.
This work would appeal instantly to the mature readers who are grown up and have seen enough winters of their lives to see life from an objective point of view and as a fragment of experience. Also, younger readers would find many different ideas being shared, opening their minds to new perspectives and finding chances to update and refresh their vocabulary here and there. Therefore, recommending Kazi’s poetry collection to readers of all ages would only mean doing justice to the author’s work.
