Habitat

About the Book: 

Where monkeys chatter
And squirrels scatter
Nuts and fruits
Against my roots
And blooms that vie
In shape and colour
To attract and capture
The insect life that is enraptured
By the habitat I provide.

From Deforestation

We inhabit everything that comes our way: people, places, nature. Writing itself is our habitat. It is this space that Bashabi Fraser that explores in her new collection Habitat.

These poems challenge our understanding of rules and form when it comes to poetry. Bashabi plays with the duality that her life has instructed her with – through having lived in two different countries, experiencing two different cultures – yet allowing the parallels to still come through. At its core, this collection is about our journeys – where we have been, where we are going, and what we are moving through. It is all about our habitats and our connection to them.

Reviews:

Bashabi Fraser’s timely new collection, Habitat, speaks with an acute awareness of the richness of our world and of the perils that increasingly confront it. A great gallery of birds, trees, cats and people, in landscapes of her two countries, India and Scotland, are vividly present here in poems of many shapes, all full of a love that is both fearful and full of hope. PETER FRANCE

A warm and passionate hymn to the richness of the planet, from the Arctic to Arthur's Seat, Glasgow to Kolkata, lamenting the losses of nature in our time but exulting in human relationships, journeys and ‘the call of home’. RUTH PADEL

I headed straight for the birds – well, that was the idea, but I got waylaid by the Prologue and the Foreword, particularly those fireflies dancing to a subtle rhythm and rhyme scheme, scattering ‘our suppressed thoughts’. So I left the river to its ‘churning burial ground of eternal oblivion’ only to find that the first bird to speak is caged and full of righteous anger, and then that it submits its freedom to serve a caged human. These poems come tumbling out of a copious basket. Observation is sharp and there is much humanity and positivity. They speak straight to you. That’s why I like them so much. JOHN PURSER

In these dark days for the planet, what shines through Bashabi’s work is a deep love for family and friends, for humanity at large and the natural world. Spiritual at their core, the poems celebrate our oneness, sing their song of hope. ALAN SPENCE

One of the effects of the climate crisis has been the vitality of a poetry that is decidedly public-facing; a poetry whose urgency often dispenses with the page. The tensions behind such a development run through Habitat. The core of the collection may be found in personal encounters, but its ‘argument’ extends far beyond that. The ‘habitat’ – the community of which Bashabi Fraser writes – encompasses all living things. It is a book rich in praise, but also freighted with warning. TOM POW

About the Author:

BASHABI FRASER was born in West Bengal in India. Living a multicultural and colourful life, Bashabi divides her life between the two countries she loves most – India and Britain. After living in London, Bashabi returned to India to attend a convent boarding school on the Himalayas where she was threatened with expulsion after breaking all possible rules! Happily this threat never came to fruition and with a PhD in English Literature, she is now an associate lecturer in English Literature for the Open University and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at Edinburgh University. She travels widely working as a poet, attending councils and conferences around the world and has written for many publications, has two collections of poems in print and has been included in a number of anthologies. Bashabi has also written children’s stories and is writing a shadow puppet play and a book on the Bengal Partition and is a classical Indian dancer and choreographer. She now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and daughter.