A Gathering of Smoke : Gopiah's South Indian prose-poem journals

"It is ab intricate, polyform book, playing at once in different times and spaces: South Indian time and Eastern American time, the topographies of Madras and Pennsylvania, Adam's Bridge and Three mile Island, Kurukshetra and Gettysburg. Most of us have not yet learned to listen to such polyrhythmic structures even when orchestrated for eight hands by a musician like Ornette Coleman, much less when they are played on a single syllabary by an unknown writer like Kerry Keys. Yet the world of this book is the real world. It is American where some of us save everything while the rest of us throw everything away, and it is India, where no one does either, and it is both, where regardless what we do or do not do, everything is and all of it is crumbling and shifting."  -Robert Bringhurst, British Columbia

Format/pages: paperback / 242 pages

ISBN: 0894106228

Publisher: Three Continents Press

Year: 1989