Lamentations
In Lamentations, Subhash Jaireth composes a river of voices – philosophical, tender, and reverent – flowing through landscapes of memory, loss, and renewal. Part meditation, part love story, and part elegy for the natural world, these prose poems move between rivers and deserts, Bashō and Hafez, Australia and Persia, tracing how water remembers, how language listens, and how grief transforms into grace.
Through the dialogue of two consciousnesses – intimate, questioning, and profoundly attuned – Jaireth explores the porous boundaries between the human and the elemental. Rivers become voices, rocks become listeners, and words themselves turn liquid, carrying echoes of the world’s oldest stories.
A work of rare beauty and wisdom, Lamentations is both a hymn to water and a quiet reckoning with what it means to belong – to a place, to another, and to the earth itself.
Subhash Jaireth was born in Punjab, India. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Russia studying geology and Russian literature. In 1986 he migrated to Australia. He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian.
His published works include three books of poems: Golee Lagne se Pahle (Before the Bullet Hit Me) (Vani Prakashan, 1994); Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996); Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You (Wild Peony, 2003); and five books of prose fiction and non-fiction: To Silence: Three Autobiographies (Puncher & Wattmann, 2011); After Love (Transit Lounge, 2012); Moments (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014); Incantations (Recent Work Press, 2016).
His most recent books include a collection of essays titled Spinoza’s Overcoat: Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020), which won the 2021 ACT Book of the Year, a book of translation from Hindi, Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (Recent Work Press, 2020), Aflame (Gazebo Books/Life Before Man, 2021), and George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays (Gazebo Books, 2024).
