Mother Muse Quintet

‘MOTHER MUSE QUINTET’ is Naveen Kishore’s second book of poetry after ‘Knotted Grief’. In this hypnotic collection, silence and stillness seep into the crevices of language. The words — which seem to emerge from our own memories, dreams and secret vaults of imagination, as from the author’s — swirl, like time itself, in a slow, timeless vortex of loss and longing, death and life. Memory, like a veil, travels the path of multiple generations who appear as storytellers, as companions, as mysterious versions of the self and, poignantly, as Mother Muse — both birth mother and mother tongue. Mother Muse shapes the imagination of her son, like the heart beating or the wind dashing or the wave cresting; becomes the breath, gentle or fierce, of the poet’s own voice.

CALLED immensely readable by Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Shortest History of the Soviet Union’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick provides an overview of the history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, and an authoritative distillation of 75 years of communist rule. It covers the end of the Romanov era, the birth of the Soviet Republic, Lenin, Stalin, the World Wars, the Cold War, scientific advancements, the Gorbachev era, Chernobyl and the dissolution of the USSR, the rise and future of Vladimir Putin’s expansionism and his war against Ukraine. Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of History at the University of Chicago, asks tough questions concerning the future of communism and how it affects global politics.