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Top 50 Books for Lovers of Poetry
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
For those who appreciate it, poetry can be most soothing for the soul. It has the ability to expand our minds, stretch our imaginations, and offer fresh perspectives through lyrical expressions. Our selection of top picks for books on poetry are both evocative and moving, provocative and healing. Browse now:
The Forest I Know by Kala Ramesh
Tanka, a 1300-year-old, five-line lyrical form of poetry from Japan, was originally called ‘waka’, which translates as ‘short song’. The Forest I Know, Kala Ramesh’s first book in this genre, consists mainly of tanka, tanka prose and tanka doha. With stunningly bold and beautiful poems encompassing every facet of our day-to-day living, this book is at once ancient and modern, enduring and unforgettable – and is sure to resonate with the reader.
A Poem a Day is a volume of Indian poetry like no other, selected and translated by Gulzar, one of Indias most renowned and respected poets. This prestigious volume showcases 365 memorable poems a poem for every day of the year written over the seven decades since Independence by some of the leading poets of the Indian Subcontinent. Originally written by some 279 poets in 34 Indian languages (including Hindi, Urdu and English), the poems appear in bilingual versions: in English and in Hindustani, as translated by Gulzar himself. This wonderful selection, personally chosen by Gulzar and featuring the work of poets from the north, south, west and east of India, as well as the North-East, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, presents a kaleidoscopic view of history, human experience and poetic expression since 1947. A true collectors item, A Poem a Day belongs on the shelf of any litterateur.
Rumi by Farrukh Dhondy
Love, devotion, suffering and longing mysteriously co-exist in the poems of Jalal-ud-din Rumi. Composed almost eight centuries ago, the deep spirituality and buoyant wisdom of the poems are a source of inspiration to millions today. Farrukh Dhondy’s translations not only offer a modern idiom to the poems, but also faithfully keep intact their religious context. With selections from Rumi’s masterpieces the Masnavi and Diwan-e-Shams, as well as his ghazals, this volume is a poetry lover’s treasure-trove.
Arriving fourteen years after his debut collection, Feroze Varun Gandhi’s second poetry offering, Stillness, is a study in elegance. The poet displays a rare maturity and confidence in allowing access into his inner world. Searchingly introspective, suffused with a strange calm, the poems are both poignant and profound. The language is sophisticated and self-restrained, the tone reflective, honest, vulnerable. A beautifully produced collection of short poems illustrated with fine photography, this is a sublime experience for poetry ‘passionista’ and layman alike.
In Other Words by Javed Akhtar
Apart from being a successful scriptwriter in the Hindi f ilm industry, lyricist and poet, Javed Akhtar belongs to a family without whose mention the history of Urdu literature cannot be considered complete. Javed is the son of the famous progressive poet Jan Nisar Akhtar and the writer Saf iya Akhtar of Zer-e-Lab fame, and the nephew of the legendary poet Majaz. One of the most respected names of his time, the poet Muztar Khairabadi was Javed’s grandfather. Muztar’s father, Syed Ahmad Husain Ruswa, was a stellar poet, too. Muztar’s mother, Syeda Hirmaan, was among the handful of women poets of the nineteenth century who figure in the history of Urdu literature. Hirmaan’s father, Allama Fazl-e Haq Khairabadi, was not merely one of the most well-regarded scholars of his age but also a philosopher, a leader and a poet who wrote in Arabic. He was a close friend of Ghalib’s, and the Diwan-e-Ghalib, that the world considers so precious, was edited by him. He was sent to prison in the Andamans for his role in the First War of Independence in 1857, which is where he died and his grave still lies. Javed Akhtar has received literature, culture and learning as a legacy from all these ancestors. And through his own poetry, Akhtar continues to increase the wealth he has inherited.
Khooni Vaisakhi by Navdeep Suri& Nanak Singh
Jallianwala Bagh. 13 April 1919. Twenty-two-year-old Nanak Singh joins the mass of peaceful protestors agitating against the Rowlatt Act. What then turns out to be one of the worst atrocities perpetrated by the British Raj, and a turning point in India’s independence movement, also becomes a life-changing experience for Nanak Singh, who survives the massacre, unconscious and unnoticed among the hundreds of corpses. After going through the traumatic experience, Nanak Singh proceeds to write Khooni Vaisakhi, a long poem in Punjabi. The poem was a scathing critique of the British Raj and was banned soon after its publication in May 1920. After sixty long years, it was rediscovered and has been translated into English for the first time by the author’s grandson, Navdeep Suri. Featuring the poem in translation and in original, this bilingual book is accompanied by essays from Navdeep Suri, Punjabi literature scholar H.S. Bhatia and BBC correspondent Justin Rowlatt. Khooni Vaisakhi is not only a poignant piece of protest literature but also a historical artefact and a resurrected witness to how Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims came together to stand up to colonization and oppression in one of India’s darkest moments.
In and out of cultures, countries, homes and beds, Hoshang has his innocence and spirit undimmed. And both shine through luminously in these poems. These poems contextualize Sufism for the twenty-first century using the wisdom and music of the East. This is indeed a glorious addition to the growing list of new world poetry.
Selected Poems by Joy Goswami & Sampurna Chattarji
This collection brings together, for the first time, poetry from three strikingly different phases of Joy Goswami’s formidable literary career — Surjo-Pora Chhai (Ashes, Burnt by the Sun, 1999), Moutat Moheshwar (Shiva, My High, 2005) and Du Dondo Phowara Matro (Merely a Spurt of Time, 2011). Selected and translated by Sampurna Chatterji, this book, which includes an in-depth interview with the poet, introduces the English reader to the world of a poet whose language is powerful, inventive and often enigmatic. While some poems invoke a landscape that is ‘mysterious, anguished and visionary’, in others Joy Goswami achieves mischief and melancholy with the deftest of strokes.
Rumi: A New Translation by Farrukh Dhondy
Marked by lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi’s poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images. While many recent ‘translations’ have sought to give Rumi’s poetry a certain hippy sensibility, robbing it of its true essence, Farrukh Dhondy attempts to bring out the beauty and sensibility of the verses whilst imitating the metre of the original. Dhondy’s translations provide a modern idiom to the poems, carefully keeping intact their religious context.
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi
Each poem promises the sharpness of broken sea-shells, the smell of brine. In this collection, Tishani Doshi inhabits the different homes: her childhood, the body, cities that were passed through, cycles of rain. There are poems of celebration and homages, as there are poems lamenting human cruelty and dispassion. This is also a book of travel and of homecoming, of familiar decay and startling, haunting discoveries of our oldest themes of love, grief, suffering and anger.
Nude by Vishal Bhardwaj& Sukrita Kumar Paul
All of us know Vishal Bhardwaj as a film-maker whose films have consistently pushed the envelope and as a composer who has churned out some of the biggest chart-toppers in recent years. Here’s presenting him in a new avatar: a poet. Over the course of these twenty-five ghazals and an equal number of nazms, Vishal comes across as a poet with a distinctive voice and a style all his own. Whether it is a romantic ode pulsating with an intense passion or yearning, or a bitter, ironic comment on the state of the nation, a gentle sense of wonder, an undeniable rhythm and a subtle intrigue pull one into the poems in Nude, both in the original Hindustani alongside their English translation by Sukrita Paul Kumar. Unusual imagery, an evocative style and an idiom that is contemporary, yet reminiscent of the old-world charm of the Hindi and Urdu poetic traditions, each poem is wrapped in mystique. The Internet and Mirza Ghalib on the roads of Mumbai happily coexist in these poems, offering an insight into how contradictions can be reconciled simply and ingeniously.
Wild Words by Lakshmi Holmstrom
In 2003, a group of men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets – particularly in the work of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani – charging the women with obscenity and immodesty. More than a decade later, a deep divide still persists in the way readers and critics perceive women poets. Tamil women poets have been categorized as ‘bad girls’ and ‘good girls’. The traditional values prescribed for the ‘good’ Tamil woman are fearfulness, propriety and modesty. Our poets have chosen, instead, the opposite virtues – fearlessness, outspokenness and a ceaseless questioning of prescribed rules. This anthology celebrates the poetry of the four poets through Lakshmi Holmstrom’s English translation.
Imagine brings together the finest work from Shanta Acharya’s five books of poetry with a generous selection of new verses. Her subtly layered poems, with deep roots in two cultures, explore and reflect on the human condition. They address consciousness and creativity, issues of self and of the ways in which identity is perceived, belonging and exile, love and betrayal, suffering and realization. Moving with ease from ancient Indian scriptures and history to sharply observed lyrics about nature, from the horror and injustice of war to the absurdity of life, Acharya’s work reveals the largesse of her vision. This selection is a sound introduction to an uncommon poet.
The Dreaming House by Tanya Mendonsa
Conceived of as a journey within a book, a journey in both geographical and spiritual terms, The Dreaming House is an anthology of poems in two parts. The first, titled ‘The Voyage Out’, is composed of poems on people the author has met – whether in real or imaginary life. The second, ‘The Country Beyond’, focuses – almost in a trance of delight – on the natural world and its ability to change human beings. Tanya Mendonsa’s language, by turns poignant and muscular, is lyrical and contemporary, yet it is obvious that she is rooted in poetic traditions going far back in time. Here is a strikingly individual, strong and joyous voice raised in poetry, graced with rare charm and insight. International customers click here to buy the book online.
Pluto lost its status as a planet only recently. Seeing Pluto sad on being rejected thus, my heart sinks. It is so far away, so tiny, so all my pint-sized poems I gift to it,’ says Gulzar. In this exquisite collection of short poems, Gulzar addresses his pet themes – relationships, his relationship with God, Nature, Time, the art of poetry – with characteristic wit and brevity, and the uncommon ability to find meaning in the mundane. The bleakness of these verses on man’s violence against Nature, religious fundamentalism, physical illness and spiritual turbulences are leavened by an undertone of optimism. In Gulzar’s work, even the darkest moments are filled with light; hope never gives way to despair. Beautifully rendered into English by Nirupama Dutt – and including, for the first time in a volume of his poetry in English, a collection of the poet’s own sketches – this is a collection to savour and treasure.
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri’s is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life — a wayward history, an indeterminate future and a present condition of wanting to out-think time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of the most important poets of our time.
Leela by Alka Pande
Leela is a collection of Indian poetry from ancient to contemporary times, complemented by some extremely refreshing and original photography, graphics and paintings. The book emerges from the celebration of sensuality and desire in the Indian cultural landscape, where eros is a part of everyday life. Dipping into the classical texts, the Bhakti poets, Sufi mystics, and moving on to the bold canvas of contemporary verse, it presents a mood-filled bouquet meant to be enjoyed in a lover’s company or alone.
In Malabar Mind, Anita Nair’s debut collection of poems, the real and corporeal, landscapes and mindscapes are explored with a fluid ease. From the quirky resonance of Malabar’s names to the stressed drone of television newscasters during war time; from the apathy of non-stick frying pans to the quiet content of cows chewing cud, Anita Nair rakes through the everyday, pausing each time for an unusual moment. Love, failure, humor, irony, lust, hope, anguish; beaches, crows, bus journeys, hospitals, just about every aspect of the human existence finds place in this collection of poems written over a decade.
When God Is A Traveller by Arundhathi Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems explore ambivalences — the desire for adventure and anchorage, expansion and containment, vulnerability and strength, freedom and belonging, withdrawal and engagement, language as exciting resource and as desperate refuge. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, and all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize, When God Is a Traveller is a remarkable book of poetry.
In the words of the poet herself, ‘Bearings began as the only tangible signs of an attempt to stay connected to a language that felt most intimately my own, and yet did not figure in my landscape any more.’ Through its three sections, Virga, Damaged Goods and Terra Infirma, Karthika Nair meditates on the intertwined themes of directions, moorings and disclosures, with the multiple meanings and connections inherent in the title itself. Bereavement and absences, the loss of memory and love, concerns about home and identity, find eloquent expression in these evocative poems which the poet likens to a logbook of journeys without any particular destination in mind, with language as shape-shifting map, and the desire to express, to share as the sole, somewhat unreliable, compass. This is Karthika Nair’s debut collection.
Until the Lions by Karthika Nair
In Until the Lions, Karthika Nair retells the Mahabharata through multiple voices. Her poems capture the epic through the lenses of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens but also abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god. As peripheral figures and silent catalysts take centre stage, we get a glimpse of lives and stories buried beneath the edifices of god and nation, heroes and victory; a glimpse of the price paid for myth and history–all too often interchangeable.
Countries of the Body by Tishani Doshi
First published in 2006, Tishani Doshi’s debut collection, Countries of the Body, marks the arrival of a major new voice in international poetry. It won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection. Each poem in this collection sings of the body with all its contours and contradictions. Republished in this very special edition, the poems will enchant readers old and new with their delicate and haunting quality.
A witches’ brew of art, politics, religion and mythology, The Profane is rich with music and images. Here are poems of heartbreak and disillusion, of loneliness and mortality, but also of passion for life on earth, in all its mud and glory. In the pages of this collection, Kurt Cobain, Napoleon and Amir Khusro meet, and Homeric tough guys get what they deserve. Satyajit Sarna’s vision embraces our broken world and salutes the one chance we get to experience it.
Everything Begins Elsewhere by Tishani Doshi
Since her first collection of award-winning poetry Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, but extends beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers’ childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi’s poems guide us through an ‘underworld of longing and deliverance’, making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again.
The Altar of the Only World by Sharanya Manivannan
Sita in a forest, loved and left behind, looks towards the night sky and sees Lucifer’s fall from grace. Inanna enters the underworld, holding her heart before her like a torch. It is not easy to bear the weight of light; wilderness takes time to turn into sanctuary. These are poems of exile, resurrection, impossible love, lasting redemption – and above all else, the many meanings of grace.
The World That Belongs To Us by Akhil Katyal
This first-of-its-kind anthology brings together the best of contemporary queer poetry from South Asia, both from the subcontinent and its many diasporas.The anthology features well-known voices like Hoshang Merchant, Ruth Vanita, Suniti Namjoshi, Kazim Ali, Rajiv Mohabir as well as a host of new poets. The themes range from desire and loneliness, sexual intimacy and struggles, caste and language, activism both on the streets and in the homes, the role of family both given and chosen, and heartbreaks and heartjoins. Writing from Bangalore, Baroda, Benares, Boston, Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka, Delhi, Dublin, Karachi, Kathmandu, Lahore, London, New York City, and writing in languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and, of course, English, the result is an urgent, imaginative and beautiful testament to the diversity, politics, aesthetics and ethics of queer life in South Asia today.
Triage by Margaret Mascarenhas
‘Savage. Searing. Compelling. Images and words that are like ice picks piercing the heart. Mascarenhas dazzles … and hurts.’ — Shobhaa De ‘Give me bread and poetry, and make the poetry the rich, sensual, kingfisher-coloured poems that make up Margaret Mascarenhas’ Triage. A wickedly intelligent, major voice in Indian writing, Mascarenhas will remind you that poems are as essential, and as satisfying, as fresh-baked bread.’ — Nilanjana Roy
The poems in this collection contain the poets reminiscences of his childhood, and bemoan the loss of its innocence with the passage of time. They are also about love – its complications, pains and even its joys. But even the simple love poems usually contain a much deeper message; it is up to the reader to explore the various levels of meaning for himself or herself. Akhtar’s verse is thoughtful without being pretentious. On the surface it appears disarmingly simple and direct, but frequently has something profound and significant to communicate.
The Secret Garland by Archana Venkatesan
Legend tells us of a young girl in the ninth century who swears to marry none but Vishnu. She appropriates a garland meant for him – a transgressive act, yet one of singular devotion.,. Born of her boundless, consuming love for Vishnu are the two exquisite Tamil poems, Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. These compositions, in which Vishnu is her awesome, mesmerizing and sometimes cruel lover, give expression to Kotai’s powerful experiences and her vibrant, bold sensuality. Eventually, the story goes, Kotai wins Vishnu for herself, becoming his bride at the great temple of Srirangam, for which extraordinary feat she earns the title Andal: She Who Rules. The Secret Garland aims to capture the lyricism, beauty and power of the original poems.
Nindiya Chor by Rabindranath Tagore& Gulzar
Nindiya Chor/The Crescent Moon marks the irresistible coming together of two giants of poetry: Rabindranath Tagore and Gulzar. Drawing on some of Tagore’s most well-known poetry for children, including Shishu, Gulzar’s translation provides a whole new insight to the world of the child. Including the original in Bengali and Tagore’s own English translations of the same, this is a collector’s edition. A must for all lovers of poetry and literature.
Man of Glass is the first collection of poems by Tabish Khair in a decade, following the critically acclaimed Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000). In the three sections of this new collection, Khair draws upon three writers from across centuries, cultures, literary genres and languages: Kalidasa and his fifth-century Sanskrit play The Recognition of Shakuntala, Asadullah Khan Ghalib and his early nineteenth-century Urdu ghazals, and H.C. Andersen and his Danish ‘fairy tales’. All three are united not only by Khair’s chosen language of creativity, English, but also by a concern with reflecting about life and loss, identity and indoctrination, humanity and divinity, and the nature of things and being. Drawing subtly upon the past, Khair engages powerfully and movingly with many issues and events, particular and perennial, of vital concern to the reader today: immigration, Afghanistan, terror, love, loss, death, human duplicity, faith, prejudice, the Iraq War, genocide.
While I Write by K Satchidanandan
This collection showcases the new and landmark poems of one of India’s most prolific litterateurs. K. Satchidanandan’s oeuvre is marked by a keen awareness of his roots and an endearing intimacy with nature, for he grew up talking to cats and crows and trees, gods and spirits; the wind, rain and soil are his limbs, voice and soul. And yet, from this sensibility arise too poems which are global in their concerns and hide in their wake the many-layered realities of the ever-changing world around us.
The HarperCollins Book Of English Poetry by Sudeep Sen
The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry is a major landmark international book that reflects the vibrant contemporary poetry culture of India and the broader Indian diaspora – the United States and Canada, The United Kingdom and Europe, Africa and Asia, Australia and the Pacific. The featured poets are born post 1950, after India became a republic, and showcase the best English poetry by Indians over the last sixty years. A unique feature of this discerning anthology is that over 90 per cent of the poems are new and unpublished in individual author volumes. Expertly edited by Sudeep Sen, this significant book is a must-have for literature and poetry lovers – an essential compendium for academics, students, librarians and interested lay readers who want to sample the vibrant cultural and intellectual milieu of India, at home and in the world.
This is an anthology of short poems, fiction and nonfiction pieces by Kamala Das. To the Indian reader of fiction and poetry, Kamala Das (1934-2009) needs no introduction. Her novels, collections of poetry and short stories in English and Malayalam – and indeed her life itself – have both challenged and redefined the boundaries of middle-class morality. Her sensational autobiography, published in English as My Story, created a storm in literary circles and established her as the iconoclast of her generation. Her conversion to Islam in 1999 at the age of sixty-five sent social and literary circles into another tizzy. Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das brings together stories, plays, poems and non-fiction writing that have previously not been anthologized. While ‘The Fair-Skinned Babu’ is the sardonic tale of an author who has become a Muslim searching for a contract killer to commission her own killing, ‘Neipayasam’ is the poignant story of a father feeding his children the delicious dessert prepared by their mother whose death that morning the children are too young to comprehend.
Baaghbaan by Rabindranath Tagore & Gulzar
Baaghbaan/The Gardener marks the irresistible coming together of two giants of poetry: Rabindranath Tagore and Gulzar. Drawing on some of Tagore’s most well-known poetry collections – Chitra, Kshanika, Sonar Tari – Gulzar’s translation provides a whole new insight to the Bard of Bengal. Including the original in Bengali and Tagore’s own English translations of the same, this is a collector’s edition. A must for all lovers of poetry and literature.
Disappearances by Seshadri Vijay
Vijay Seshadri is a writer of subtle, elastic and unblinking intelligence. His poems inhabit the crossroads of history and wilderness, the imaginative realm where fir and alder trees share a common life with reggae bands, refugees, office buildings and speeding traffic. Grave and witty, classical and contemporary, this volume is a compilation of two books, Wild Kingdom (1996) and The Long Meadow (2004) for which he was awarded the 2003 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
Fire Altar by Keki N. Daruwalla
A collection from the celebrated Keki Daruwala Written between 1991 and 1993, Daruwala’s collection celebrates the histories and legends of the grand Persian empire, a phase of history barely glanced at in contemporary literature. In these verses, Daruwala explores the histories of Darius, Cyrus, Xerxes and their courts, their battles, their triumphs and their losses. He ties in the narrative of the Persian empire, with its history of tolerance and its significance as the birthplace of Zoroastrianism, with the more well-known stories of Alexander the Great and his Greek cohorts. A journey for roots, meaning and religious and social understanding, Fire Altar is a collection that will resound with readers for many years to come.
Patriots, Poets and Prisoners by Nilanjana Roy
Founded in 1907 by the visionary Bengali thinker and reformist, Ramananda Chatterjee, The Modern Review quickly emerged as a vital platform for debates on nationalism, patriotism, history and society. Alongside the leaders of the freedom movement – M.K. Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore – thinkers like Romain Rolland and J.T. Sutherland contributed to its pages. While questions of self-rule, gender justice and caste inequality were hotly debated, the Review also ran fiction, poetry and personal essays, forging a character for itself that was uniquely literary, political as well as cosmopolitan. Marking Chatterjee’s 150th birth anniversary, this anthology, edited by members of his family and introduced by Ramachandra Guha, brings together a selection from the rich archives of the Review to convey its eclectic range and ambitions. Even after a century, the debates that played out in its pages resonate with the spirit of the turbulent times we live in, making it urgently relevant to the state of the nation and the body politic.
He Is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar by Kala Krishnan Ramesh
Murugan — the younger son of Shiva and Parvathy, the younger brother of Ganesha — is a tricky and temperamental god, but he is beloved of the poets. Fittingly then, Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s contemporary bhakti poems in He Is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar speak in the voices of many poets. We don’t always know who they are, but as the poems unfold, one voice emerges above those of the rest. She is the god’s favourite poet, a woman whose whole life revolves around him.
You Are Neera Translated by Sunil Gangopadhyay
A first-rate translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s celebrated Neera poems. Sunil Gangopadhyay was the foremost of Bengal’s angry but romantic young poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout his writing life, he wrote a continuous sequence of love poems addressed to a mythical woman named Neera. These poems became the mantra of two generations of young women and men. From ardent, sexually charged verses of early infatuation, through the demanding and sensual rhythms of a full-blown relationship, to the mellowing middle-age memories of romance, the Neera poems are a pulsating testimony to the cycle of passion, desire, and, inevitably, unrequited longing.This is a selection of the most stunning of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Neera poems, most of them translated for the first time, and as capable as ever of sparking off a hundred love affairs when recited aloud.
Baaghbaan – Nindiya Chor Box Set by Rabindranath Tagore& Gulzar
Gulzar discovered Tagore at the age of ten through an Urdu translation of The Gardener and instantly fell in love with his poetry. In fact, that was the first book he stole from a local library. Since then he has read numerous translations of Tagore’s poetry. This two-book set is his tribute to the poet laureate of India. Baaghbaan comprises his translations of Tagore’s poems gleaned from collections such as Chitra, Kshanika and Sonar Tari while Nindiya Chor is based mostly on Shishu, Tagore’s book of poems on the world of the child. Alongside Gulzar’s inimitable translations come the poems in the Bengali original and English translation.
Not Springtime Yet by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Unlike many of the Indian English poets of the present, Priya doesn’t make her poems obtuse; being also a novelist, she follows a loose narrative pattern in her series of poems.
Closure – Some Poems and A Conversation by Kamala Das
This unusual volume brings together two disparate voices, of friends who met and conversed over many years, in different cities and at different stages in their life, both of whom turned to poetry in moments both anxious and happy. The poems by Kamala Das include the very last one she wrote before death claimed her, and in many ways Suresh Kohli’s work reflects similar concerns, with death and distances, both physical and emotional.
Tonight, The Savage Rite by Kamala Das
This is a collection of love poems by two outstanding poets: Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy. Das is no longer alive but her reputation and following continue to grow. Pritish Nandy, with an imagery, power and immediacy that compliment hers, provides an apt accompaniment in this collection that was first published in 1979 and is now being reissued with stunning drawings by iconic artist Manu Parekh.
All That Was And Is by Bibhu Padhi
All That Was And Is, Bibhu Padhi’s mystical collection of poems, is based on the ancient Indian sacred texts, the Upanishads. Each poem is a non-cerebral response on a single Upanishadic mantra. They are quiet like the mantras themselves, trying to unravel and, in turn, define the Supreme and its relationship with the world and the individual or the jiva. Through these lyrical meditations, everything is absorbed into a dreamlike consciousness.
Ever since he published his first book of poems, A Guarded Space (1981), the trajectory of Manohar Shetty’s poetry has gradually shifted from the intensely personal to embrace and encapsulate a wider and increasingly fractious world. Using dovetailing internal rhythms and his trademark offbeat metaphors, Shetty interweaves a hard-won lightness of touch with sardonic humour, a reinvention of Indian English and cutting irony to expose the scars of an iniquitous society, emerging, in the process, as a quiet but distinctive and resilient voice in contemporary English verse in India. This is a book to be savoured and treasured.
After Death Comes Water by Joy Goswami& Sampurna Chattarji
An essential collection of prose poetry from Joy Goswami, the most important poet writing in Bengali since Jibanananda Das. Selected and translated by Sampurna Chattarji, this book showcases the extraordinary range of the writer’s genius and inventiveness.
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