60 Indian Poets
60 Indian Poets spans 55 years of Indian poetry in
English, bridging continents and generations, and seeks
to expand the definition of ‘Indianness’.
Beginning in 1952 with selections from Nissim Ezekiel’s
first volume of poetry which was published in London,
it honours the canonical writers who have come to define
modern Indian poetry—influential craftsmen such
as Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who
died within months of each other in 2004—and reinstates
neglected or forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman,
Gopal Honnalgere, Srinivas Rayaprol and G.S. Sharat
Chandra.
The collection also introduces an astonishing range
of contemporary poets who live and work in various parts
of the world and in India. There are writers from Bombay
and Berkeley, from New Delhi and New York, from Melbourne,
Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hong Kong, Sheffield, Connecticut
and Itanagar, among other places—writers who have
never shared a stage together but have more in common
than their far-flung locations would suggest.
This definitive anthology aims for ‘verticality’
rather than chronology. Exhaustive, and stunning in
its scale and vitality, it represents a community ‘separated
by the sea’ and connected too—in familial
ways—by the unlikely histories of a shared English
language.
Edited by Jeet Thayil
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