Notes on Burials

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins

An archaeological dig, a visit to an imagined London, puppies that come back from the dead. In Notes on Burials Jayant Kashyap makes a series of journeys: real, mythological and etymological as he navigates what is lost and what is buried. Kashyap’s poems of love and remembrance reach out to collective losses, human and environmental, in a series of disappearing acts and excavations that take us from broken childhood patio to a snowboarder in an avalanche. 

Published May 2025.

In these tender poems, definitions, etymologies and repetitions perform a kind of excavation, digging to the root-places but also layering back up, hand over hand, word over word, to build a language of grief that feels fractured and true. — Miriam Nash 

Jayant Kashyap’s Notes on Burials asks the reader to consider different types of burials and retrievals, including personal and etymological burials, in cool, reflective poems. – Holly Hopkins