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Literary Review
India Wales
"CYLCHGRAWN cenedlaethol," says the masthead, comfortably comprehensible to the Welsh reader, "o farddoniaeth newydd". After this familiar introduction, however, subscribers to the current issue of Poetry Wales will find themselves puzzling over the juxtaposition in "omlette-pao".
The Indian media has been gushing unceasingly that England's summer this year is an Indian one — this on the strength of a shop display, a musical and a cricket match; the gush can now intensify with this India-special issue of Poetry Wales. It has poems by Menka Shivdasani, R. Raj Rao, Arvind K. Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar and others. There are three new poems after a long hiatus from Adil Jussawalla.
It's hard publishing poetry in India. Manohar Shetty's essay here describes the "occasional avuncular pat on the back...the large publishing houses" give poets; usually publishers respond to poets with a resounding silence. Poets still persist, perhaps as Shetty himself does, for "the moment... when some wisp of thought and image is snatched miraculously from midair and made palpable on paper".
However, Landeg White, a poet, in his essay on "Poetry from India", certainly does not consider its poetry miraculous. White accuses Indian poets of being insufficiently creative with language, of not evolving "some Indian way of using English that goes beyond surface polish." His special animus is reserved for Dom Moraes, who "seemed forever to be wearing a sensitive heart on beautifully tailored sleeves." "And at sixty-four", White admonishes, "he's ill-advised to be writing so much about breasts."
Please tell us and oblige, White Sir, how long it is allowed to be thinking about the same?
Poetry Wales, Summer 2002, ed. Robert Minhinnick, by subscription.
ANURADHA ROY
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