Indian Poetry Titles

Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700677

Footnotes , Avik Chanda's first collection of poetry in English, brings together his work over the past five years. In this, he has set out to explore a deeply personal emotional landscape, employing memory to create snapshots from a poetic autobiography. While some of the pieces have a purely personal emphasis, as in the title poem 'Footnotes', a breadth of allusion throughout the collection hovers on the periphery of three larger-than-life domains — Painting, Music and History, which are his chief interests. In much of Avik’s work, there is also a conscious effort to use language as a means to aspire to its synaesthetic equivalents in music and painting, so that words attain a Sonata form, as in 'Les Adieux' or echo the texture and tone of monochrome paintings, as in 'Composition in Grey' and 'Composition in Blue'.

Published 2021. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617384

In these poems, written after the death of his parents, Amit Chaudhuri gives us both a record of loss and an account of tasting life afresh. Here, past and future are often conjoined, as are moments, people, and sounds: Ramanujan the mathematician and Chaudhuri, related as much by Cambridge as they are to each other by their suffering bodies; absent parents and the daughter absent during home-cooked meals; a 9th-century Chinese poet and Sybille Bedford finding a reader in Chaudhuri, who himself addresses a ‘Reader’ located in both past and future; the first day of the year with its ‘cough cough’ rhythm echoed by the ‘tatak tatak’ of the dhak on Durga puja; two mothers, one American, in Kaddish, the other an Indian maid with a face disfigured by burns; the ‘human and God touching faces nose to nose’. Moving through this world – Chaudhuri’s universe – now annotated by bereavement, one cannot not be infected, again, by the wonder and newness with which he experiences the world: that, even after living all these lives, ‘I never felt I knew the place’.

Published 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618800

“Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s new book of poems, Book of Rahim , is his first collection of new poetry in twenty-five years. It contains extraordinary records of the everyday, as well as a frequent reimagining of history that makes it as commonplace as a relative or a piece of furniture, and all the more strange and unrepeatable because of that. These involve Mehrotra inhabiting the voice and time of an ageing Ghalib (author of a memorable diary reflecting on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857); his revisiting Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (1556–1627), a Baharlu Turk and an important figure in the Mughal nobility during the reigns of Akbar and Jehangir; and his discovery of objects and letters from his family home in Lahore. The result is a frayed immediacy that hefty historical novels find difficult to achieve.” —Amit Chaudhuri

Published 2022. Paperback, 320pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95. 

ISBN 9781848617964
Not for sale in North America, Australia or India.

Gathering the work of a lifetime, and including a number of new poems, this Collected Poems —first published in India by Penguin, and then in Australia by Giramondo—is a comprehensive collection of the work of one of India’s most influential English language poets. 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 the volume. 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.

Published 2022. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618251

Even as she was searching for people who had wanted to live like a tree, a quest recorded in her book How I Became a Tree , Sumana Roy was simultaneously writing poems to imagine the opposite: How might it feel for plants to live social lives as humans? In V.I.P. , ‘plant’ replaces ‘people’ to become Very Important Plant . In this new cosmology, leaves and fruits and roots are seen as perhaps they have never been before – whether flowers can be repaired or trees have insurance policies; the invisible scaffolding of water in onion and the jackfruit as the Buddha’s head, the papaya as Trojan horse and the ‘war-veteran fine fuzz’ of peaches, the ‘shape of ceremony’ of apples and the cosmopolitanism of the forest; how we want affection to be boneless and why the taste of light might be bitter; or whether God might be a vegetable…

Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700608

No Man's Land is Tupa Snyder's first collection. Born in Calcutta, she has studied at universities in India, the United States and England. This book demonstrates the arrival of a confident new voice that straddles cultural divides.

"Few new poets explore the ins-and-outs of identity — self, family, nation, memory, place, language — with the lyric intensity of Tupa Snyder. Snyder parleys with the Romantic quest for the idealised self as much as its present day fragmentation, to achieve works of power, formal range, and emotional depth, and to open a window onto her unique vision of an Anglo-Indian heritage."
—Andy Brown