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Parvati In Darlinghurst

In widely diverse voices and textured muscularity lie the beating heart of our English poetry, shows this anthology

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Parvati In Darlinghurst
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What stops you is the blue door, the bolt unbolted but the lock firmly in place. Why a door, you wonder, on the cover of a book that boldly announces its ‘English poetry’ status and by doing so goes beyond barriers? Because the poets in this book, except that we know they belong to the Indian diaspora, could have come from anywhere in the world, and actually do. Brooklyn, London, Jamaica, Toronto, even the Pont Alexandre Trois, anywhere and everywhere Indians have settled. So much so that a poet like John Siddique has been described as “a stellar British poet” in The Spectator.

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The world they describe encompasses fast food, heroin and flop houses, a world becoming more familiar to most poets of Indian origin. One could cite Vikas Menon’s sense of place, which is very far from his native Kerala but translated. Ravi Shankar does what echoes a take on Wallace Stevens with his uses of mint, more Jamaican than the familiar pudina. Parvati is to be found now in Darlinghurst, which is where the Indian world has sprawled in Michelle Cahill’s poem.

This does not of course leave out trees in Dhenkanal, goats in Mumbai and Sitas in exile, but that known Indian world is on the whole smaller, because poets writing in English are now as free to choose their subject as their metre. These are the poems of a post-9/11, 26/11 world, a world which has lost its innocence and where the champak odours have faded into a sickly sweet nightmare.

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Contemporary poetry in English, barring its Indian grace notes, is becoming part of a global voice and an edgy way of looking at a world where the age-old and new age jostle and a hard-eyed loss of innocence manifests itself. Not that lost innocence is to be regretted, since these are the poets of the fall, with access to a wider range of experiences than past generations did, though the intensity of the experience remains the same. Poets have always felt deeply, but about different things.

What unites these diverse voices are a confidence in language and a textured muscularity in the use of the word. This, along with an impressive body of work, was the reason why they were chosen. There is also perhaps a greater diversity in language and influences simply because of the broadened world-view. Poetry is however one aspect of this anthology. The other is Sen’s introduction. There Sen writes that English by now is an approved Indian language and as a result qualifying it with the national description is no longer necessary. However, he laments the lack of discerning anthologies and authoritative collections of verse, which is perhaps a slightly unnecessary lament given the fact that the Jeet Thayil-edited anthology came out not so long ago and that various collections have been emerging slowly but steadily. Yes, more people sit down to read a bestselling novel than flip through a poetry anthology—when I was looking for a title for my novel Curses In Ivory, then called Curses and Poetry, I was told by my publishers that the word ‘poetry’ was avoidable if I wanted readers. This could be why Sen asserts that “the best English poetry written by Indians in the contemporary national and international literary arena is perhaps as good or superior to Indian fiction in English as a whole”. There will most certainly be a backchat of columns in response to that.

Quibbling aside, this new anthology is a good heft in the hand, well laid-out and does contain a definitive selection of modern poetry by Indians written in English—much published poets, it must be said, many published by Sen in his role as consulting editor for various distinguished publications worldwide. Between these covers are 80 contemporary poets, including Sen himself, many of whom have written new poems for this book. It is this wealth of new material which sets it apart from other anthologies—a staggering 400 poems collected from poets born after Independence, from the 1950s. Sen calls his anthology a “mapping of poetic terrain”, which it is, in many senses of the word. Here reggae, ekphrastic verse, canzone, bussokusekika, sestina, Bhartrhari-style shataka and pantoum jostle. However, having admired and read, one regrets the older missing voices and verses—Keki Daruwala, Mamang Dai’s tribal mythology, to pick out a few.

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