Stout and Tender is Badri Raina’s third (and largest) anthology of poems in which the academic-poet, while musing and introspective, feels compelled to engage with glaring contemporary brutalities, anguish, sad and reviling ironies, the slow, stabbing death of humanism, and societal change inflicted by the digital age.
Srinagar, Kashmir, where childhood and youth were spent, is a backdrop to both tender and hard-hitting outpourings. Most striking is Professor Raina’s railing at the morally unacceptable with rather youthful acerbity tempered by the stolidity of age. Yet, there is a hopeful chime about the bright and sunny at the end of the darkness.
Here are poems that are comments on eternal truths that recur in every age.
