|
|
The Bloodaxe Book Of Contemporary Indian PoetsStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionJeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.Thayil's starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for "verticality" rather than chronology, Thayil's anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of 'chutnified' (Salman Rushdie's word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. ReviewsThis is a crucial addition to world poetry and an eye-opening reading adventure. -- The Bloomsbury "Review"
RECENT RADIO FEATURE ON INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH Author descriptionJeet Thayil was born in Kerala in 1959 and educated in Jesuit schools in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. He is a graduate of Wilson College, Bombay, and he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. He has published four collections of poetry, including English (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and These Errors Are Correct (Westland Books, 2008), and edited Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). He has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2004, he moved from New York to New Delhi and currently lives in Bangalore. |