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The Anagram 77 pages Anagram: word rearranged to form another. A metaphor for change and reinvention, a hermeneutic examination of the self, which nevertheless retains the basic elements that make up the consciousness. In her second collection of poetry, Laksmi Pamuntjak continues to look at human experiences and the stuff of everyday life: of love and loss, of grief and regret, of acceptance and rebellion, of fear of the unmapped and delight in the new, of redemption and the possibility of grace. This volume also includes eight poems on Buru Island in From the Buru Notebook, which focuses on a period during President Suharto’s administration (1965-1998) in which the island was turned into the site of a large penal colony where alleged communists and Communist Party sympathizers were detained for more than a decade without being formally charged or tried in court.
…Laksmi’s imagery too is startling
often and satisfying because it’s usually surprising and right;
it’s not so easy to be startling and right.
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“With
a language at once personal and sublime Laksmi Pamuntjak interrogates
the vicissitudes of her life, drawing from them not easy lessons but paradox
and complexity. The courage to make a moment become forever gives these
poems their charge and their powerful poignancy. When this voice becomes
persona, as it does in several political poems, the candour remains. The
voice loses none of its conviction or resonance, but speaks again with
a passionate authority and imaginative power…