Books
Publications
Poetry
The Alchemy of Nine Smiles: Nine Long Poems, Red River, 2024
Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems, Nirala, 2023
Lost Horoscope is a grand poem of loss, healing and recovery in the Covid times by Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The title poem captures, in words of American poet James Ragan, “an enlarged memory of his childhood and his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago.”
The book also showcases 13 new poems that Yuyutsu wrote before the Pandemic and bear testimony to his evolution as a poet, celebrating diversity of multiple forms and faith. Here folk imagination fuses with the personal histories to recreate his encounters with the wayward shadows of his relentless travels around the globe: a young woman revealing her actual age in a Chengdu bar, a lost lover on the flagstone steps of the Annapurna’s steepest climb, a stranger’s request to compose a poem at a birthday party in a San Francisco, a scorpion scar on the marble shoulder of an Australian interpreter in Beijing Book bar, the sighting of jasmine flowers at Vishnu’s alter at a Boston Art Exhibit, a hillside grandma’s advice revealing the wisdom of eating ants to improve eyesight and a demon child on a giant swing ready to unhinge the hunger of the huddled huts in the high Himalayas. In the final poem, the poet reminisces on his life wondering where the story of his travels around the world would come to an end.
The Second Buddha Walk: Inspired by the Second Buddha: Master of Time Exhibit at Rubin Museum, New York, Nirala, New Delhi, 2018
An Exhibit at the Rubin Museum, New York, on Padamsambhava, also known as Second Buddha hurls Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu Sharma into action. Right there he starts working on a long poem inspired by the life and times of the Buddhist saint who in the 8th century visited Tibet via Nepal and converted 'Red-faced' Tibetans into Buddhists. Thus the Second Buddha motif emerges referring to Padmasambhava as the Second Buddha and represents the way in which past can become present.
Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 2016
Quaking Cantos is the creative response of a world-renowned Himalayan poet to the earthquakes that shook Nepal in 2015, killing thousands and leaving more than a million people homeless, vulnerable to the ravages of the harsh Himalayan environment. In the aftermath of the earthquakes, his North and Central American reading tours suspended, Yuyutsu returns to Nepal to bear witness to the devastation the “cosmic commotion” has caused in his own Himalayan home. “These are wonderful, troubling, and moving poems,” discerns American poet and educationist, David B. Austell. “It must have drained Yuyu to the core to write of such catastrophe.” Yuyutsu sees his world shaking, lives dislodged, avalanches burying alpine villages, stupas cracking up, shrines shaking, “the Lord’s own body cracked into two lifeless boulders/ his mace, hid scepter, his lotus,/ his splintered quiver full of blunt arrows…” He celebrates the resilience and unassuming courage of civilians struggling to re-start normal lives, selling their meager merchandise in the rubble of old buildings without any morbid fear of the aftershocks. He also sees a child crawling on the chest of his dead mother looking for her nipple, and a quake survivor chained to a post in a cowshed in his own home. The poet sees the shrine of his family deity, Gorakathnath, also Nepal’s presiding deity after whom the Nepal nation was once named, cracking up like “a bud of a prophesy / or the fortune of an empire.” To quote another American poet, David Axelrod, “Yuyutsu Sharma has taken up the tools of his craft and expertly begun the process of healing and rebuilding his homeland.” The poignant world of fright and faith seen in Yuyutsu’s poetry will not only leave the readers stunned, it will also “help us all to understand the fragility of our human condition.”
A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 2016
A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems is a brilliant and groundbreaking new work focusing on the "first city of the world" by the internationally acclaimed Himalayan poet, Yuyutsu Sharma. Reminiscent of F.G. Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O' Hara and Carl Sandburg, the poems constitute Sharma's reflections on what it means for a Himalayan poet to transform to a new creation, a New Yorker.
Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to ‘A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems’, Nirala, New Delhi, 2014
Milarepa's Bones, Helambu:33 New Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 2012
The Nepal Trilogy I-III Photographs and Poetry about the Nepal areas of Annapurna, Everest,
Helambu & Langtang, www.Nepal-Trilogy.de,·www.Nepal-Trilogie.de) (english-deutsch, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe Germany, 2010
Annapurna Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 2008
Yuyutsu’s devotion for the mountains and the people living there is unparalleled. Though his work was interrupted with the rise of insurgency and the consequent political turmoil in the Himalayan nation, the poet continued to long for the hidden valleys and mule paths where, as the scriptures say, the soul of the Gods lives.
Even in his dreams he conjures the treks to the remote Himalayan regions, searching for life on the bleeding mule paths of human struggle, listening to the chorus of cicadas and dramas of hunger and strife in the hushed grounds of Little Paradise Lodge, chartering history of human attempts to invade the realm of eternal snow with moving cameras, frozen spaghetti and plastic bags.
Like exquisite fields of Himalayan flowers, these are poems of high artistic integrity about harsh truths of mystery, history and humanity. Sensual, sharp and stunning, these concrete images will leave the readers breathless. A huge achievement, bringing alive the unsung agony of the people of the high Himalayas.
Space Cake Amsterdam and other Poems from Europe and America, Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009
Sharma is “a shaman…black bag bulging / from magical rainbows, / serpents from an Hindu Heaven, / skull of an abducted female Yeti,” and he casts spells in these strange, visionary, outrageous and magical poems.’ Tony Barnstone The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English Whittier College, Author/Translator of Everyman’s Chinese Erotic Poems. “A fiercely sublime poet …the book confirms an enormous talent, as well as purity of purpose with which he approaches his calling. Lines jump out, burning themselves into your consciousness.” Eddie Woods in ‘Amsterdam Weekly’ “Yuyutsu RD Sharma brings the bracing airs of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.” Pascale Petit, Former Poetry Editor, Poetry London. “Most noted, justifiably, for his poems about his native India/Nepal, Mr Sharma proves in this volume that he is a genuine poet of the English-speaking world whose gentle yet ironic gaze is equally at home in the west, and equally adept with cultures which must have been as strange to him at first as the Yeti is to us. So, if you want a glimpse of the future, when cosmopolitan writers cross borders and enrich techniques, Space Cake, Amsterdam is an excellent place to start. Mr Sharma is living proof that English has become the medium for international cultural exchange, and that poets of his skill and scope are its chroniclers and sages.” —Robert Scotto Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, CUNY
The Lake Fewa and a Horse, Poems New, Nirala, New Delhi, 2005, 2009
Poèmes de l'Himalaya, trans. by Nicole Barrière and Camille Bloomfield, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2009
Poemas De Los Himalayas: Bilingual Spanish/English Poetry Collection, Translated into Spanish with an Introduction by Veronica Aranda, 2010, Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain
Some Female Yeti & other Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 1995
Hunger of our Huddled Huts & other Poems, Nirala, New Delhi, 1989, 2011
Non-Fiction
Annapurnas and Stains of Blood (Travelogue), Nirala, New Delhi, 2010
A highly engrossing account of world’s youngest republic passing through great historic transformation. Internationally known poet and columnist for several dailies including The Himalayan Times and The Kathmandu Post, Yuyutsu RD Sharma for the first time brings alive the secret commotion behind the great change in Himalayan nation that the whole world has been watching curiously. In his lucent prose, he puts together his best to unleash the myriad colors of violence in the contemporary Nepal and in the rest of the world during his legendry travels. Terror on the deserted Nepalese highways, merciless butchering of innocent Nepali workers in Baghdad, dismal day of London Bombing, murder of Theo van Gogh, the State of emergency in India, the book captures rare moments in contemporary history.
Not of Flesh and Blood: A Memoir (Upcoming)
Translations
Dying in Rajasthan, 1985, Short Stories by Ramanand Rathi, (Translated from the Hindi), Nirala, New Delhi
Folk Tales of Sherpa & Yeti, 2008, Shiva Dhakal (Translated from the Nepali), Nirala, New Delhi
Roaring Recitals: Five Nepali Poets, (Gopal Prasad Rimal, Bhupi Sherchan & Others) (Translated from the Nepali), Nirala, New Delhi
WORKS OF GOPAL PRASAD RIMAL, BHUPI SHERCHAN, BANIRA GIRI, SHAILENDRA SAKAR AND BIMAL NIBHA.
Kathmandu: Poems Selected and New (An English/Nepali Bilingual Edition), Cathal O’ Searcaigh, Translated from the Gaelic by Seamus Heaney, John Montague, and others;
Translated into the Nepali, Nirala, New Delhi
Everest Failures, White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu 2008
Baghdad, February 1991, A Bilingual Nepali /English Edition, Ronny Someck, Translated into Nepali by Yuyutsu RD Sharma, Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2010
Mother’s Hand: Selected Poems — A Bilingual English/Nepali Anthology by Jidi Majai , Translated into Nepali by Yuyutsu RD Sharma, Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2020
Edited
Elysium in the Halls of Hell, 1991, Poems about India by David Ray, Nirala, New Delhi
Dispossessed Nests: The 1984 Poems, 1986, by Jayanta Mahapatra, Nirala, New Delhi
Bagar: An Asian Poetry Special Number, (1989–90) Kathmandu, Nepal
General Editor, Nirala Series (Since 1989)
Guest Editor, Omega, Special Issue on Nepali Poetry (www.howlingdogpress.com) with Michael Annis, Howling Dog Press
Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, since 1990
Pratik's Special Dutch issue (2007 Spring Issue) with Harry Zevenbergen as Guest Editor
Pratik's Special British issue (2007 Summer-Fall Issue) with Pascale Petit as Guest Editor
Ten: The New Indian Poets; Edited with Jayanta Mahapatra, Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2013
Drunken Boat's Special Nepal Folio, Himalayan Arts, 2017