Biography imtiaz dhakar this room
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Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist, and filmmaker born in Pakistan whose work focuses on belonging to multiple cultures, feeling like an outsider, searching for the feeling of home, geographical and cultural displacement, and the experiences of women. In 'Postcards from god I', for instance, the deity is a blank canvas, "nothing but a space / that someone has to fill", while in "Question 1" God becomes a TV channel-hopper, fast-forwarding, pausing and rewinding through our prayers, asking: "Am I there / when I can’t hear your voice"?
These include Purdah and other poems (1988); Postcards from god (1997); I speak for the devil (2001); Theterrorist at my table (2006); Leaving Fingerprints (2009); Over the Moon (2014); and Luck Is the Hook (2018). Those from her earliest books, Purdah (1988) and Postcards from god (1997), feature concise, atmospheric conjurings of place: one of Dharker's better-known poems, 'Blessing', which describes a slum neighbourhood in Mumbai where a mains water pipe bursts, is here read in her captivating trademark style; each lingering vowel sound and full rhyme painting the scene.
'Honour killing' is a defiant, subtly politicised piece, beginning with an identity strip-tease; "what happens when the self", as Dharker herself puts it, "squeezes past the easy cage of bone". More books than SparkNotes.
Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. She has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library, worked on a series of poems based on the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral as well as projects across art forms in Leeds, Newcastle and Hull.
In order to focus on her own work, Dharker turned down the opportunity to serve as theBritish Poet Laureate.
Study Guides on Works by Imtiaz Dharker
Blessing (Imtiaz Dharker poem)Imtiaz Dharker
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist, and filmmaker born in Pakistan whose work often touches on issues of cultural displacement and the search for the feeling of home.
In 2020 she became the Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her collections include Purdah (Oxford University Press), Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table (all published by Penguin India and Bloodaxe Books UK), Leaving Fingerprints, Over the Moon, Luck is the Hookand her latest, Shadow Reader (May 2024, Bloodaxe Books UK).
Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! She is interested in how things work, in art, in history, in politics… You cannot hear her perform without being somehow transformed by the experience. These poems harbour an obvious gravitas, but their accessibility, contemporaneity, and occasional levity lend them an inviting dynamism.
Poems from a third collection, I speak for the devil (2001), explore the place of women in contemporary societies both East and West.
events all over the country to more than 36,000 students a year. She has been called a "truly global poet" who weaves both personal and public topics into her work (Poetry Archive).
Dharker is the author of seven poetry collections. Dharker was a 2011 recipient of a Cholmondeley Award for Poets and in the same year, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
This Archive recording, then, gives listeners the chance to fully experience Dharker's poems with all of their bristling nuances; her introductions to, and delivery of the poems as measured, detailed and illuminating as the distinctive drawings which also feature in her published collections.
Imtiaz Dharker's Favourite Poetry Sayings:
"Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing." - James Tate
"Writing a poem is a kind of hunt for language." - Jackie Kay
"Poetry is...a kind of leaving of notes for another to find, and a willingness to have them fall into the wrong hands." - Matthew Hollis
"Poetry is an utterance of the body...It is the language in thrall to the corporeal, to the pump and procession of the blood..." - Glyn Maxwell
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker.
But there are also poems with a philosophical edge, which ventriloquise the almighty so as to question the nature of belief and the tensions between the religious and secular. In 2014, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry on the basis of her collection Over the Moon and for a lifetime’s contribution to poetry. Witty, wise, profound and moving, her work crosses continents.’
Jackie Kay, The Guardian
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Her poem "Blessing," first published in the 1994 collection Postcards from god, ...Living SpaceImtiaz Dharker
"Living Space," first published in 1997, is a poem by Imtiaz Dharker.
The inaugural Poet of the Fair at London Book Fair, her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service.