Poetry can be a chaos of movement, a kaleidoscope of words which spill into pattern and move away. Words which spell disproportion and reckless seeking at times, and at others make a sage or sorrowful summation.Ranjani Neriya's collection of 64 poems - PROMISE-a life - is one such. A mutant thread seems to run through the poems, stringing beads of reminiscence strewn along the path of childhood, whilst emerging into the growing vision of an ever-expanding world. Every poem evokes a different picture, a different emotion - the rasp of her Grandfather's beard, her mother's birthplace, her father's camera, her geography teacher, erstwhile ushering in vignettes of iconic figures like the hardworking women at the laterite quarry, women fighting for their rights, even a searing study of a woman who thirsts not for water alone. The agony of dumb, driven animals and uncelebrated creatures too find a place along with poems which poignantly treat loneliness and bereavement. All are presented with great skill and virtuosity.Whether moving a grain of sand into a heart-block or shattering a boulder to clear the mind, the poems delight in delineating vistas seen with a blissful 'inner eye'. PROMISE is a book to be treasured.

Ranjani Neriya celebrates the natural world for its own sake, and also as a cosmic framework for the events that make up or disrupt our lives. The poems gathered together to form her beautiful collection, The Flowering Word Tree, are sumptuous in their wealth of sensory detail, alive with the names and auras of plants, flowers, herbs, and birds. Neriya's poems float and glide through space, evoking the tropical ethos of Mangalore, on India's south-western coast, where she was born and raised, as well as the glorious cycle of the seasons that plays out in the American Midwest, where she has lived for many years. Diasporic and firmly committed to her multiple homelands, she transits between memory and epiphany, reminding us that "to dream is to remember the forgotten." In such a life, the landscapes of the heart are both proximate and far away, and converge in the act of writing, which, for Neriya, is a pensive and prayerful act. When she writes that "all distance comes back/ in search of the lamp we lit/ by the russet seat near the lotus pond," we stand in the presence of deep horizons of ritual and dedication, the space of the present expanded mysteriously to embrace the experience of many generations. The finely tuned rhythms of her poetry resonate with the rhythms of an earth now vandalised by human greed yet resilient and resurgent. Ranjani Neriya's poems affirm the poet's art as that of the patient and attentive gardener, acting in accord with the patterns of frost and thaw, withering and bloom, as she nurtures the exuberance of the tree of language. Ranjit Hoskote, Author, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs

Clover, A Literary Rag is a semiannual magazine featuring stories, poems, memoir, and an occasional review. Based in Bellingham, Washington, the magazine hosts writers from the region and the world. New writers mix with seasoned writers--and writers from the Independent Writers' Studio are featured. The magazine celebrates words and in this light there are no photographs or visual art in Clover. The cover is the first page of the table of contents for that edition. We frequently have over 50 contributors. We pride ourselves in creating a beautiful setting for the written word.