In Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems

Description

In Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems is the first major collection to be published by Dom Moraes in the UK for over three decades. The collection shows the development of an urbane, witty, fiercely intelligent poet whose extraordinary life and circumstances have thrown exotic and powerful shadows over his poetic work. His early poetry is traditional in form and lush in rhetoric. What follows is a gradual and graceful movement through the excesses of Romanticism, the seductiveness of Audenesque disciplines and the political commitment which came with his return to India and its sometimes harsh realities. His work is an exploration of the cultural and psychological isolation wreaked on him by his history, and of the passions, libidinal and spiritual, which have directed him on his journey.

Dom Moraes was born in Bombay in 1938, of Indian Roman Catholic and Goan extraction. He travelled the world with his father, a celebrated writer, after his mother was institutionalised when he was seven. He studied at Oxford, and his first collection of poetry, A Beginning (1957) received the Hawthornden Prize. He has continued to write while living in London and then India, as a poet and freelance. He is the author of a memorable autobiography My Father's Son.