On the occasion of its 19th publishing anniversary, Mumbai-based Poetrywala published a collection of poems titled Stray Poems by the poet-diplomat Abhay Kuma
Poet Adil Jehangir Jussawalla will be the Poet Laureate of the 12th Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest 2021.Adil Jussawalla s many-layered, clear-eyed, uncompromising poetry is mainly rooted in the city landscape, describing equally its .
Jerry Pinto s Search for Truth
The poet and author s new book locates itself in Indiaâs post-colonial modernity and the crosscurrents of polarising narratives.
Jerry Pinto. Photo: Sreejithkoiloth/CC BY-SA 4.0
Jerry Pintoâs new collection of poetry,Â
I Want a Poem, is dedicated to âNissim, Adil, Arun and Euniceâ, with a parenthesis: âHang in there, Adil!â
To the uninitiated: these are the poets of the Bombay school â Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar and Eunice de Souza. The Bombay poets of the 1950s, â60s and â70s have been identified by literary scholars such as Anjali Nerlekar and Laetitia Zecchini as representatives of a sort of post-colonial modernism in India, similar to the Bombay Progressive Artistsâ Group, the Baroda group of artists, or the Indian Peopleâs Theatre Association. Kolatkar, along with Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, set up the legendary Clearing House publishing coop
Piece think
Supriya Nair
The essay: what a form. Oldfashioned enough to seem like it was left behind in the nineteenth century, juvenile enough to be associated forever with ‘compositions’ devised on ruled note-paper under the exhausted eyes of language teachers in school. To essay something is to try it, but as the name of an endeavour there’s something unfulfilled about it, like you didn’t accomplish what you meant to do.
That’s why writers have loved essays since the dawn of modernity, at least in English. Essays are quests. They are efforts. They’re not compositions, but the opposite – a methodical unsettling of thoughts and styles, of showing readers the smooth subject of a surface, then plumbing one level deeper and then, just as these readers have grown comfortable with the surprise, to tear open the piece and make it something else again. An essay is a story and its criticism, a description and its contradiction, a voice and its echo.