Quaking Cantos

Quaking Cantos is the creative response of a world-renowned Himalayan poet to the earthquakes that shook Nepal in 2015, killing thousands and leaving more than a million people homeless, vulnerable to the ravages of the harsh Himalayan environment. In the aftermath of the earthquakes, his North and Central American reading tours suspended, Yuyutsu returns to Nepal to bear witness to the devastation the "cosmic commotion" has caused in his own Himalayan home. "These are wonderful, troubling, and moving poems," discerns American poet and educationist, David B. Austell. "It must have drained Yuyu to the core to write of such catastrophe." Yuyutsu sees his world shaking, lives dislodged, avalanches burying alpine villages, stupas cracking up, shrines shaking, "the Lord's own body cracked into two lifeless boulders/ his mace, hid scepter, his lotus,/ his splintered quiver full of blunt arrows..." He celebrates the resilience and unassuming courage of civilians struggling to re-start normal lives, selling their meager merchandise in the rubble of old buildings without any morbid fear of the aftershocks. He also sees a child crawling on the chest of his dead mother looking for her nipple, and a quake survivor chained to a post in a cowshed in his own home. The poet sees the shrine of his family deity, Gorakathnath, also Nepal's presiding deity after whom the Nepal nation was once named, cracking up like "a bud of a prophesy / or the fortune of an empire." To quote another American poet, David Axelrod, "Yuyutsu Sharma has taken up the tools of his craft and expertly begun the process of healing and rebuilding his homeland." The poignant world of fright and faith seen in Yuyutsu's poetry will not only leave the readers stunned, it will also "help us all to understand the fragility of our human condition."