For all those who love A.K. Ramanujan’s work, for all those who walk around with lines from his poems and translations in their heads, Soma is an invaluable resource and a delight.
Edited by scholar Guillermo Rodriguez and Ramanujan’s son and science writer Krishna Ramanujan, this book brings together the poet’s mostly unpublished ‘Soma’ poems, numbering 22. Drawn from the A.K. Ramanujan papers at the University of Chicago, the poems constitute rich archival material and offer the reader an opportunity to excavate from discarded poetry drafts, another Ramanujan altogether — one who between the 1970s and the early 80s was fascinated by the Soma plant. We might want to read Soma together with Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2019), edited by the same duo, which describes the poet’s experiments with mescalin.
