Notes on Burials
£4.50 – £6.00Price range: £4.50 through £6.00
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
Notes on Burials excavates memory and mortality with an archaeological precision. The speakers in these poems face death unflinchingly, ethnographically and etymologically. Through ancient burial rites, fire and water, from the Styx to the Vaitarani, Egyptian and Norwegian mythology, birds and rebirth, this pamphlet considers how to “dissolve a body / of its past”. Kashyap seeks the truth of grief and urges us to finally accept that “we are all dying”. A worthy and thought-provoking winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize. – Alice Kate Mullen, PBS Autumn Bulletin 2025
Notes on Burials is thoughtful, tightly woven, and rich with ideas that keep circling back in new ways. It is the kind of collection that invites rereading, not because it’s obscure but because it rewards reflection. These are poems that stay with you, prompting you to return and search again for meaning in their careful, deliberate lines. – eche poetry
Description
Jayant Kashyap is an Indian poet and author of two previous pamphlets, Unaccomplished Cities (Ghost City Press, 2020) and Survival (Clare Songbirds, 2019), and a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021). Kashyap won the Young Poets Competition at the Wells Festival of Literature in 2021, and was awarded a Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2025. Kashyap’s poems have featured in POETRY, Denver Quarterly, Poetry London, Magma, Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Plumwood Mountain, and Poetry Wales, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology. Kashyap presented at COP26, the United Nations Climate Conference 2021.
