More than 500 images explore the free-form embroidered creations of the tribal people of India's renown Gujarat Province. Dating back 30 to 100 years, they include original garments, temple offerings, welcome banners, and second-generation quilted works that combine precious remnants for new decorative uses. These items have trickled onto the world market where they are treasured by decorators and collectors. Textile artists, designers, and ethnologists alike will delight in these examples of the boundless imaginations of itinerant tribal women who make much of little in their elaborate, mica and bead-studded creations. Abstract, geometric, floral, and religious imagery celebrates the boundless exuberance of their quest for beauty.

Asian Embroidery Is The Result Of An International Seminar Held By Crafts Council Of India, Which Was Coordinated By The Well-Known Authority On Textiles, Jasleen Dhamija. Writers, Researchers, Professors, Who Have Spent A Life Time Researching In Different Regions Of Asia Came Together To Share Their Know Ledge. Besides Well-Known Subjects As Phulkari, Bagh, The Central Asian Suzani, There Are The Little Known Embroideries Of The Philippines, Of Kyrgyzstan, Of The Chinese Settlers In Indonesia, The Beadwork Of Sarawak. There Is The Brilliant Work Of The Symbolic Significance Of Light And Shining Surfaces And A Broad Sweep Of The Creative Expressions Of Different Regions. The Contributors Are Well- Known Authorities Padma Shri Jagdish Mittal, Prof. Joanne Eicher, Prof. Victoria Rivers, John Gillow, Prof. Shehnaz Ismail, Dr. Judy Frater, Ruby Ghuznavi, Edric Ong And Many Others.

Since ancient times Samarkand and Bukhara, have been thriving centres of craft production due to their location on the main routes of the ancient 'Silk Road.' The commercial, religious and political experience of these oasis cities had major lasting influences on craft production. Gold embroidery was no exception. Detailed examination of historical sources related to gold embroidery or zarduzi, showed that, until the Bolshevic Revolution in 1917, consumption of gold embroidery was restricted to the wealthy middle class and court elites. It was most spectacularly employed in displays of power and wealth among the courts of the Emirs before the Russian invasion in1868 and was produced by ustos, or masters in court ateliers. Follow zarduzi to the present day.

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.

Hoping for Foreword by Tricia Guild (British designer, OBE, and the founder and Creative Director of Designers Guild, the international home and lifestyle company with a store and showroom on the Kings Road and Marylebone High Street in London, and offices in London with showrooms in Paris, Munich, Stockholm and New York.) Demand is high for exotic armchair travel from the safety of home. India's mystique to Westerners continues, esp for artistic inspiration.