All We Have

“These poems of rapt observance are happy to dwell in the uncomfortable shadowlands of uncertainty and doubt. They also achieve the remarkable feat of appearing to be very old while at the same time being intensely fresh and alive. ‘What are leaves / if not green birds’ we read in one of the many moments of startling visionary transformation that make this collection a beautiful echo chamber in which one wishes to linger.”
Katharine Towers, author of Oak

“Tender, precise (‘slowly circling / on the griddle’), surprising (‘Voodoo’), and inventive (‘Mountain Mind’) are just some of the words that come to me as I read these poems.”
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, author of Book of Rahim 

“There’s an understated shimmer to the spare, lyric poems of Sarabjeet Garcha’s All We Have. They have silence and time built into their walls. They know both light and dark, and outside their window sits a green bird called transformation.”
Tishani Doshi, author of A God at the Door 

“Sarabjeet is one of my favourite contemporary poets. In these roof-like poems we come face to face with a spiritual philosophy that stirs us to re-read, rest, return, remember and rehabilitate our relationship with life and the living.”
Sumana Roy, author of Provincials

“The juxtapositions are arresting and original—a new relationship is both handcuffs as well as the infinite sign, and leaves are tired birds that have returned home and will let roots know about the sky. These poems carry the voice of perennial youth and the experience of a poet in his prime.”
Mani Rao, author of Bhagavad Gita: God’s Song

“These are poems of deep spirituality and visionary experience. They are like the Pahari artist Nainsukh’s paintings in their delicate beauty and robust wisdom.”
Ranjit Hoskote, author of Icelight

“In All We Have, Sarabjeet Garcha shines an intimate light on a universe that borders on the unfathomable. Quietude is the hallmark of his poetry. Precise yet evocative, restrained yet effusive, melancholy yet radiant, his poems neither abandon hope nor cherish false optimism. In texture as well as expression, the pellucid poems in this book possess the lilt of clouds hovering over the Himalayas.”
Devi Prasad Mishra, prominent Hindi poet

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Sarabjeet Garcha is a poet, editor, translator and publisher. His five books of poems include A Clock in the Far Past and Lullaby of the Ever-Returning, in addition to a volume each of poems translated from Marathi and prose translated from Hindi. He has translated several American poets into Hindi, including W. S. Merwin and John Haines, and several Indian poets into English, among them Mangalesh Dabral and Leeladhar Jagoori. His poems, translations and essays have been published in the Notre Dame Review, Versopolis, Lyrikline, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Two Lines Journal, the Indian Quarterly, Scroll, the Wire, among other publications and several anthologies. He has received the Fellowship for Outstanding Artists from the Government of India, the International Publishing Fellowship from the British Council, and the inaugural Godyo Podyo Probondho Award. His poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Russian, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Hindi. He is the founder and editorial director of Copper Coin (www.coppercoin.co.in), a multilingual publishing company based in Delhi NCR.