Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth collection of poetry enacts the experience of standing at the edge-of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours of going up in flames. Yet the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany.
Icelight transits between audacious exploration and contemplative retreat, doubt and belief, melancholia and momentum. Hoskote’s poetry unseals deep scales of geological time and strata of historical memory, always aware of the perils currently confronting the planet. His poems are informed by the unfolding crises of war and ecocide. This is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transcience in the face of mortality.