Collected Poems

by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

We think of contemporary Indian writing as sharing the same teeming quality as the country itself. But the simplicity and clarity of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poems point to another Indian literary tradition, one based on understatement and resonance, enhanced in Mehrotra’s case by the influence of the surrealists and William Carlos Williams, and the Beats, the first sharpening his focus on the image, the second giving a colloquial ease to the language of his poetry. In this respect he is closely related to the generation of Australian poets who developed their craft in the 1970s and 1980s. His poetry discovers dignity and continuity in ordinary detail, while raising it to a magical or dream-like intensity. At the same time it offers glimpses into his own life and history, fixing and extending the moment in modest yet compelling ways.

Genres: Poetry

336 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2016

About the author

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has published six collections of poetry in English and two of translation — a volume of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller, recently reissued in Penguin Classics, and Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics). His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) has been very influential. He has edited several books, including History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His collection of essays Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History was published by Permanent Black in 2012. A second book of essays, Translating the Indian Past (Permanent Black), appeared in 2019.

Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).

Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.