A poem that never ends

Representative Image

Reading bookmaker-illustrator Namrita Bachchan's new picture book A Full Circle (Harper Design, R599) is meditative and comforting - you are entrenched in a rhythmic loop of hopeful lyric and dream-like imagery that doesn't end, if you don't wish it to. The book, Bachchan, confesses in her afterword was personal - "a collaborative project between mother and daughter".

The genesis was a poem that she wrote one evening, when her daughter Noah was two years old: "In fact, I didn't so much write it, as come into it," she says. The photographs that she made of Noah since her birth, "are the vision behind this book". On one level, Bachchan says it's a pictorial documentation of Noah's personal evolution, and on another, "a more objective response to observing childhood in motion". And yet, despite the book being such an individualistic exercise, it resonates with anyone who wants to delight, feel more, breathe sweetly, and feel less despair. Her poetry in its plainness has a lyrical, hymnal quality to it that also heals and makes you believe in the beauty of our thoughts and dreams.

Namrita Bachchan

Her illustrations - what appears to be a combination of pencil drawings and water colours - travels through time and space inside a world where bears wear skirts, fish reside inside flowers, children fly with birds, and mountains are lit up by a blanket of stars and umbrella of fireworks. It's a world we'd like to inhabit.

Available at all leading bookstores