Seasons in the skin, songs in the soul

Reading feel like just reading a book of poems; it feels like being welcomed into a room full of women who've lived, struggled, laughed, and loved deeply.

- NAVANITA VARADPANDE

These are not just poems, they're distilled legacies from women who have resisted quietly and emerged unshaken. This luminous collection of 163 poems by 50 Indian women poets, aged over 60, doesn't murmur from the shelf; it stands tall, adjusts its glasses, and speaks with hard-earned clarity.

The introduction to Silver Years: Senior Contemporary Indian Women's Poetry is an eloquent, richly layered preface to a beautifully woven anthology of poems, thoughtfully edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal, and Anita Nahal. It chronicles lives shaped by multiple roles: daughters, wives, mothers, professionals, caregivers. These women aren't fading into the margins; they're claiming space with bold, unapologetic voices. Here, the 'silver' in their years isn't about decline, but defiance, gleaming and unapologetic.

Amita Ray's "A Sunday Morning" begins in familiar tranquility but ends in jarring disquiet, a serene scene shattered by grim headlines. Ray inserts horror into domesticity with chilling elegance, a subtle reminder of how violence infiltrates even the most peaceful moments. Anita Nahal's "We Are the Kali Women" is raw, powerful, and confrontational. It opens with the disquieting refrain, "There's nothing wrong. Nothing wrong," and yet every line pulses with unspoken fury. It challenges patriarchy, colourism, and the hypocrisies society cloaks in politeness.

Her invocation of Ma Kali is both a spiritual cry and a revolutionary war chant. This isn't mere poetry; it's reckoning. Themes of aging unfold with beauty and defiance in Anju Makhija's "Greying Follicles" and Nahal's "I Am a New Aging Woman". One reflects with wry humour, the other with bold declarations, but both reject invisibility. Smita Agarwal's "At Sixty-Three" and Snigdha Agarwal's "It's Not the End" echo this resistance; aging is not erasure but a revelation.