Love Lyrics

The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance. --Willis G. Regier, The Chronicle ReviewNo effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience. --The Times Higher Education SupplementThe Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot.... Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes. --New CriterionPublished in the geek-chic format. --BookForumVery few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs. --TricycleThe short lyric poem appears with great frequency in Sanskrit collections and displays a wide range of themes. Bhartrihari is the most famous composer. Amaru and Bilhana also offer excellent examples.This anthology of the Love Lyrics of three Indian poets conjures up an atmosphere of love both sensual and social, ever in tension with love's rejection or repression. The flavor of all these poems- ?maru's seventh-century C.E. Hundred Poems, Bhartrihari's anthology Love, Politics, Disenchantment, from the fourth century, and B'lhana's eleventh-century Fifty Stanzas of a Thief-is the universalized aesthetic experience of love.Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC FoundationFor more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.orgBailey, Greg is the author of 'Love Lyrics', published 2005 under ISBN 9780814799383 and ISBN 0814799388.