Knife on the Edge

Asit Maitra: Biography

Asit Maitra, FRCS, MA (Creative Writing), NCL University, Emeritus A&E consultant, Newcastle NHS Hospitals Trust. His poems have appeared in:

• His chapbook, Chapati-Moon (ID on Tyne, 2007)
• A pamphlet, ZIG-ZAGS, with Pat Borthwick
• In Acumen (1997), Other Poetry (2002) and Anthologies: Norwich OPC (2004)
• The Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry (2000)
• Masala: Chosen - Poems from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Macmillan children's books, 2005)
• The Ticking Crocodile (Blinking Eye Poetry Competition anthology, 2004)

Asit Maitra's first full poetry collection was Sun Dips at Juhu Beach; Knife on the Edge is his second, and he has since published a third, Under The Street Lamp. All three are published by Biscuit Publishing.

"A line of Asit Maitra’s poetry reads 'My scalpel rests. I have picked up a pen'. This encapsulates the life captured in the poems in his new collection Knife on the Edge. The first part of the collection takes the reader on a journey from the young boy in Kolkata, full of dreams, through the experience of training to be a surgeon in Britain, gradually finding his feet in his profession, learning the ways of the country. With great openness he shows the reader the obstacles, the anxieties, and the sense of responsibility. These are compelling glimpses into a life, full of compassion and concern. Asit Maitra has a keen eye for detail and the poems are full of characters and voices, remembered sometimes with humour, sometimes sadness. He draws Kolkata and Newcastle together as he explores his sense of identity. He also reflects upon our follies and inhumanities, writing in a moving way about the effects of poverty, greed, war, and violence. He is a skilful poet, choosing just the right image to make us think, never preaching, but leaving us with a sense of the richness of human experience. This is a wise and generous collection."

Cynthia Fuller

"Here are poems that speak their thoughts out plainly, tenderly: as if Breughel had come back to paint our global village. Here's a worldful of ordinary people: tourist and terrorist; NHS consultant; the man with an audible limp who sold lentils and rice 'stacked in front of him / like camel's humps'. Presiding over all of us: not Breughel but Thakurdah, grandfather. Love comes into the world with him and I'd buy the whole book for his poem alone."

Gillian Allnutt

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