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Overview
In this fourth and final volume of her autobiography, this British poet completes the work begun in Farewell Happy Fields and continued in The Land Unknown and The Lion's Mouth. Occasioned by her first visit to India, at the age of seventy-four, she reflects on the profound significance of Indian philosophy and wisdom, the 'India of the Imagination.'Synopsis
In this fourth and final volume of her autobiography, this British poet completes the work begun in Farewell Happy Fields and continued in The Land Unknown and The Lion's Mouth. Occasioned by her first visit to India, at the age of seventy-four, she reflects on the profound significance of Indian philosophy and wisdom, the 'India of the Imagination.'
Publishers Weekly
A poet and a Blake and Yeats scholar, Raine set out to find the ``India of the imagination'' in the 1980s at the age of 74. Her odyssey around the subcontinent revealed an India permeated by ``a universal sense that `everything that lives is holy' '' and a simultaneous awareness of the multiple levels of experience. While she does not ignore India's ``boundless poverty'' or the spreading ``wound'' of Westernization, Raine believes that ``India has not lost her soul at the price of technology--yet.'' Woven throughout are kaleidoscopic impressions of faces and sacred spaces, of sculpture-filled caves, the healing flow of the Ganges and the disquieting works of India's modern painters. Her narrative--rhapsodic, digressive, at times effusive--contains a deep pool of wisdom, refreshingly free of stereotyped images, in touch with the eternal India. (Aug.)