“Manan Kapoor’s immersive study returns the poet to his roots, which are inescapably Indian-there’s no other word for the syncretic mastery of the Hindi, Urdu and English traditions that shaped his work.”-Jeet Thayil
From fast-vanishing Irani restaurants pervaded by ‘the semolina sigh’ of mawa cakes to songs ‘dipped in the nasha of aged Shiraz’, these poems reach for an elsewhereness, and still wash up against the shores of some simple truths: ‘that some things are best left on windowsills’, for instance, or that ‘everything’s precious, until it’s airmailed away’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam These…
