New Delhi, The latest edition of a yearbook on Indian poetry in English features poems with diverse subjects ranging from gender to identity, food to ecology, and grandparents to festivals.
“Yearbook: Indian Poetry in English 2024-2025”, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal and published by Pippa Rann Books, also has a poem on the “atrocities” in Gaza and the 2022 attack on author Salman Rushdie.
The fifth edition of the yearbook pays tribute to Padma Shri awardee, poet and critic Keshav Malik on his birth centenary and also showcases bilingual poet K Satchidanandan as a beacon light of Indian poetry in English.
Beginning with this volume, the yearbook will feature an overview of Indian poetry in English published during the year, mapping poetry in English by Indians in India and abroad. Basudhara Roy, an academic who is also a poet, highlights, in the first of these surveys, major thematic trends and forms visible in the poems published in 2024.
According to the editors, this yearbook largely demonstrates English as an indigenous Indian language allowing the language of the region or community be present in the poet’s consciousness.
“The mother tongue is not shunned as an interference but is negotiated with English, enriching thus the creative expression. It is seen how the world outside of India too welcomes this authentic Indian English in awarding writers and translators such as Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell and more recently Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi…,” they write in the foreword.
“The volume takes on a powerful voice against the atrocities committed at Gaza. The voice comes from, amongst others, a poet from our very own Northeast, its lines unequivocal, leaving us reeling under the violence it describes,” they say.
Some poems pay attention to specific projects of development like one on the Coastal Road along Mumbai’s western coastline.
A ghazal on the attack on Rushdie is penned by a diaspora poet.
“The poem affirms the solidarity writers and poets nourish amongst each other, for each other,” the editors say.
Another poem carries its metaphor of the intricacies of the chess game face to face with child-like innocence.
There are also a few poems laced with humour besides haiku and haibun in the anthology.
There is a fair amount of diaspora poetry in this volume. International poets stationed in Norway, Austria, the UK, the US and Canada write powerfully about communal unity, climate change, nostalgia for their childhood spent in India, refugee’s tales, lynching, beef and so on, the editors say.
Some of the poets whose work have been included are A J Thomas, Bina Sarkar Ellias, Christina Daniels, Gopikrishnan Kottoor, Huzaifa Pandit, Jahnavi Gogoi, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Maaz Bin Bilal, Pallavi Narayan, Ranjit Hoskote, Sangita Kalarickal, Shoba Narayan and Tishani Doshi.
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