‘No poem or story can exist without its spine of the truths of the world’: Poet Rochelle Potkar

Rochelle Potkar prefers to write poetry as soon as she wakes up because she’s then “closest to the subconscious in language and fragments of a dialect of dreams”. Her new collection of poems written over the past five years, Coins in Rivers, crackles with raw energy and oozes with stark images, some searing, some smouldering and some , sensuous. In what is generally a mundane world around us, she finds the notion that “strange people in strange cities is a very normal thing.”

Potkar has just completed writing two novels, The Terracotta Goddesses, and The D’Costa Family, and some screenplays. But poetry, with whom she was “in a slippery relationship not so long ago”, has never really left her. Jayanth Kodkani spoke to Potkar about he new book and her work. Excerpts from the conversation:

Your poems are “coins of wisdom” in rivers of reflection. The titles of sections are “First Mint”, “Private Wallet”, “Casino Tokens”, “Antique Currency” and so on – all to do with cash or currency. What’s with the motif of money?
Poems disturb and displace. I thought of them as being inglorious when I was initially compiling the collection and called it: “The Inglorious Coins of the Counting House”. All sections followed that imagery. Under this title, the...

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