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The Glass-Blower: Selected Poems
by Keki N. Daruwalla
Part of our Arc International Poets series
Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India's leading English-language writers. He has published nine volumes of poetry, the sixth of which, Landscapes, won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987. His Collected Poems 1970-2005 appeared from Penguin India in 2006. He is also the author of three volumes of short stories, a novella, two collections of poetry for children and a travelogue, as well as being well-known as a writer on international affairs and a prolific reviewer.
The Glass-Blower contains poems from all nine published collections as well as a body of new work. Daruwalla's poetry is characterized by the vigour and immediacy of its language, the delicacy of its landscapes, the sharpness and sensitivity of its portrayals of both individuals and human society, and the breadth of its subject matter. This first full-length volume of Daruwalla's work to be published outside India provides a long-overdue opportunity to become better acquainted with a poet previously encountered in the UK — in tantalizing glimpses — only in anthologies.
[Keki Daruwalla's poems are] rightly admired for their range, from philosophical meditation to closely observed detail. Daruwalla writes as compellingly about urban India as he does about mountain shepherds, a fish, an encounter with a snow leopard, the nature of love or poetry itself. He can inhabit historical or mythical figures...; he can conjure the migration or decline of tribes and cities; he can track the palpitations of the heart in the grip of love. Dramatic narratives describing civil strife of a kind he may have witnessed through his work in the Indian Police Service keep the company of tender poems for his daughters.... Extended sequences go alongside perfectly achieved miniatures of a few lines. Above all, here is a writer whose witty, affirmative restlessness rewards the reader over and over... In spite and because of everything,
the middle lane, between / demonology and miracleturns out to offer a wonderfully exhilarating ride.
Paperback
158 pages
ISBN: 978 1904614 44 9 (paperback)
978 1904614 80 7 (hardback)
Published April 2008
