Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Description

A one-of-a-kind collection of work by one of India's best contemporary poets. Gathering the work of a lifetime, spanning four books of poetry, and including thirty-four new poems, this is the first comprehensive collection of the work of one of India's most influential English language poets to be published in the United States and the United Kingdom. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life-whether contemporary or historical-bring larger patterns into focus. Mehrotra's celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of Collected Poems. Selections from The Absent Traveller and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia."

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of several books of poetry, the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, and the translator of The Absent Traveller- Prakrit Love Poetry. He is a professor of English at the University of Allahabad and lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun. Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom, where he is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. NYRB published hisFriend of My Youth is his seventh novel. Among Chaudhuri's other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; a work of nonfiction, Calcutta- Two Years in the City; and two volumes of poetry, including Sweet Shop. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and the awards he has received for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic and Grun-tu-molani. He teaches at the University of Birmingham and is an editor at Prac Crit.

"Treasured Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra once described himself as 'a speechless shadow in a world of sound.' Tracing the turns of his lyric universe, which whirls between the fabled West and timeless East, between sunset and Dehra Dun, between poisoned wells and Heian diary, between hoopoe and dentist, sultan and ironing lady, memory and lover, gatha and translation, we are the speechless shadow, awed by the depths and concision of his inventive wit, erupting aloud at his offbeat humor, following his light footprints across the bridge of tradition and renewal to the 'approaching path where we've always been arriving.'" -Jeffrey Yang "In his best poems, Mehrotra proves to be a master storyteller with a peculiar taste for the uncanny; this is what makes his poetry a constant pleasure for the reader and an endless, delightful challenge for the critic." -Graziano Kratli, Rain Taxi Review of Books "[Mehrotra's] sense of humor is like the shadow of a sideways smile. It's a quietly forceful collection." -Lauren Kane, The Paris Review Daily "Mehrotra is a major poet expanding the possibilities of poetry in English." -Keith Taylor, New York Journal of Books "One of the finest poets working in any language...a poet-critic of an exceptionally high order." -Peter D. McDonald "Mehrotra has consciously charted for himself a personal and a poetical tradition. [The translated] texts influence and modulate Mehrotra's English poems in their craft and content in the same way that the English poems feed into the 'other.'" -Mantra Mukim, Asymptote "Mehrotra's great achievement is to let us in, as few other modern writers have, to the speaker's experience of accident and wonder." -Amit Chaudhuri "Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has written masterpieces. That few know this is testament only to a widespread ignorance of Indian poetry. His poems resist overt displays of nationality (although they depict, with ever-varied nonconformity, the nuances of India neighborhoods), and they've a minimalist, rather than a maximalist, distinctiveness. It's time they gained a worldwide audience." -Vidyan Ravinthiran