Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023

by Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri, one of the most exploratory writers of English-language fiction, has also written and published poetry that shares many of the concerns of his prose while sounding a distinct and memorable note of its own. This book collects the greater portion of that work for the first time, starting with St Cyril Road (2005), Sweet Shop (2019), Ramanujan (2021), and a selection of new and uncollected poems, as well as translations from Bengali.

Genres: Poetry

177 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2023

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.

He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

[Swapna Peri ( Book Reviews Cafe ) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Sweet Shop" by Amit Chaudhuri: A Poetry Collection

• Amit Chaudhuri's "Sweet Shop" is a collection of poems that reflect on life, culture, and memory.
• The poems serve as tasting notes, encapsulating the sweet, bitter, and sour essence of experiences.
• The metaphors used in the poems, such as "cham cham" representing the weight of the past and "rasgulla" representing pleasure, serve as vehicles for complex ideas on identity, displacement, and human experience.
• The collection transcends the physical environment of the sweet store, weaving in recollections of boyhood, literary contacts, and life in England.
• The poems resonate with readers regardless of cultural background, offering a long-lasting aftertaste and inspiring revisiting.
• It is a must-read for those who enjoy poetry and life observations, but may be sluggish for non-Indian readers due to Bengali language and cultural allusions.