Modern Indian English Poetry

Preface

A cat answers a poignant call, leaps over the boundary, comes up the stairs and rummages through the library and the racks and hides in the bag. Hung on the wall like a spider, a muddled mind not dead, sometimes hungry, at times a wooden flower and not knowing the real from the ideal, the loner envies the lover of his games. He paints the world in new hues, adds music to many songs and sets the loner’s groaning heart right. He uses his hypnotic charm to restore youth to a stifled life. He has come like rain where the sun rules. He is lofty above the crowd and he gingerly lifts a retired bird on his wind. As love flows sometimes in fairy tales of emotions, you wish you could offer more caresses to a flower but indeed, you take flight in poetic expressions.
Nothing surpasses passion except compassion. If someone tugs at your sleeve and suggests a whirlwind romance what will you do? If you give in to passion, your conscience pricks; if you do not give in, the whole world pricks. I have tried to give expression to a cultural chasm that becomes apparent to one at middle age and only after the best things offered to one have disappeared due to a lag.
When with time life begins to show signs of crumbling, you groan in pain. I have captured the sound of those groans in numerous images. It becomes more hysterical when something emerges from the unknown zones of your heart and tries to conquer time, restrain decay and forces you to push hard against accepted cultural ties. It requires a lofty ideal to deal ideally with a cultural hole. In the following poems one can read the heart’s dilemma at such an interruption. If read in the given sequence, the poems form a storyline.
If Lofty touches you passionately, it would mean that you have not been swallowed up by the chasm.

List of contents:
Lofty Above The Crowd
A Muddled Mind
Rain
Hero Honda
The Atlas
Me On The Wall
Pity
Goals
Over The Boundary
A Cat
Lover
On The Rack
I Wish
Fairy Tales
I Am Not Dead
Hoax
Answering Call
It Has Never Been As Before
False
Games
Panther Passion
The Bag
Another Possibility
Hungry Rhymes
We Shall Talk
Emotions
Sometimes
The Spider On The Wall
Those Stairs
Tug at My Sleeve
A Wooden Flower
Reality
Vegetable Passion
The Fall
The Flight
Forces
In Disguise
The Cobra
I Was Drunk
Caresses
Edging Forward
A Loner
The Naughty Streak

This article is a genuine tribute to Shiv K. Kumar, who began his poetic journey with Articulate Silences (1970), consummated it mysteriously with Where Have the Dead Gone? and Other Poems (2014). Where Have the Dead Gone & Other Poems” (2014) is a collection of 67 poems which reveal Kumar’s maturity, imagination and intuitions. He does not wish to give any message through his poetry though the reader himself becomes aware and shows his interest in understanding life through his poems—the poems which speak of the experiences in life.

Taslima Nasreen, who is known for her controversial novel Lajja, is a Bangladeshi-Swedish author with a multi-dimensional personality. She has become famous for her novels and autobiography, but her poetry, particularly love poetry is equally significant. She is frustrated in love, deceived in love and betrayed in love. Still she is in love and cannot live without love. She loves the emotional colour of love so profoundly that she paints it in most of her poems which reveal her feelings and connection to the persons and things. Her love is not confined to the body; it goes beyond. She loves her homeland with the core of her heart. She loves all the people who live in this world. Love is the only emotion to which she gives more value. Her love poems, which are coloured with emotional love, clearly prove her as a poet of love.

Nation is a concept that draws lot of attention for its complicated discourse. It impacts the
lives of its citizens in multiple ways. The inception of national consciousness in the minds of its
people creates chaos in their personal as well as public life. The dichotomy of nation as a discourse
is its inherent problematics of memory, forgetting, brutality, glory, necessity of common past,
topography, remembrances, amnesia, suffering, marginalization and politics of control, violence and
plethora of issues that complicates the human life. It also restricts the life, ideology, emotions
within the confines of national borders. These blurred lines on the spatial geography, encroachment,
wars, bloodshed brings out the hollowness and absurdity of popular concept of nationalism and
patriotism when thought on the universal levels.
K. Satchidanandan, a Malayalam poet, raises questions on the changing cartography and
futility of war and borders in his poetry collection, Questions from the Dead(2021). The
communion with nature and human beings across the world preaches the values of universal
brotherhood, peace, love, compassion. He gives hopes of possibility of utopian world where living
and non-living beings would dwell with harmony and co-existence. While portraying the futility
and absurdity of nation, war and borders, he also keenly observes the nation within the nations
caused due to unequal distribution of resources, discrimination, prejudices, and marginalization.
The present paper attempts to trace the critique of nation, nationalism and necessity of
peace, love, compassion for universal brotherhood and harmonious co-existence as reflected in K.
Satchidanandan‟s selected poems from his recently published poetry collection entitled as
Questions From the Dead (2021).
Keywords:
Nation, Nationalism, Boundaries, Borders, War, Peace, Compassion, Universal brotherhood,
Harmony, Co-existence, Civilization, Culture, Language, History, Race, Memory, Amnesia,
National Consciousness

The paper argues that the hostile reception of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, does not take in account the rich complexity of the poems that conceal a dynamic interplay of power relations in an attempt to reconfigure the subaltern discourse. Locating Jejuri through a post-structuralist discourse, we argue that Jejuri emerges, not therefore, as an urban satire on rural belief but an interstitial space where the urbane rationality clashes with the depth of the representational networks etched in the belief system, and emerges with a new hybridized outlook that does more justice to it.

The kundali is a six-line poem in Hindi verse characterized by its helical structure. Kundali in Hindi means a snake in its coil. The two main features of a kundali in its classical form are: 1. The last word or phrase of the second line recurs immediately at the beginning of the third, and 2. The first word of the kundali is also its last.

Sri Aurobindo brought to modern Indian literature what TS Eliot did for English literature. Both were pioneers in a radically different approach to their respective fields. Eliot brought about a revolution in modern English poetry with The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. The third line of the poem, an epitome of irony and paralyzing self-consciousness, transformed English verse from a Victorian sensibility to a modernist stance. He followed it up with The Wasteland, a collage-like work, that depicted the depressing and depressed state of modern man. And he topped these off with another radically new musical-verse form, the Four Quartets, which is a masterpiece of mystical-spiritual poetry. The other splendid poetical works of Eliot that add to his overall masterly oeuvre were Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Ariel Poems, and perhaps one or two of his plays, like The Family Reunion and parts of The Cocktail Party. Eliot was not as accomplished a critic, to my mind. His essay on Tradition and Individual Talent, his obvious anti-Semitism and deprecation of Walt Whitman (which he partially recanted later), Shelley and Emerson show blind spots in his critical field of vision. It is possible to err while appraising other artists or be lop-sided in one's judgment and that might be forgivable. But how does one justify his prejudice against the Jews? In any case, it shows that he was extremely fallible and vulnerable to errors of judgment as we read in TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon.

What did we promise making a tryst with India's freedom? Today India is free, but what have we for the women, children and widows? Only false promises cannot give a strong foundation and the nation cannot progress just with the leaders' white lies. While delving in such an aspect, the poet takes a use of the subconscious and the dark conscious as because the fickle and abnormal mind of man keeps viewing and opining in its way. But when we speak, we try our best to filter such a thing and try to be social and measured in our stepping. But as far as the case of Jayanta Mahapatra is concerned, he even registers the incongruities and oddities while dispensing with the topic. Sometimes when he watches, it appears to be that the country's body goes floating on the river waters. Left alone he grows into a disembodied bamboo half sunk into and half flourishing on the banks. Here old widows and dying men cherish their freedom, bowing time after time in obstinate prayers. But while on the other the children cherish to be free and dream of a world so creative and dreamy and full of imagination. The poet too wants to be with them as he opines leisurely, taking a break from his routine life or busy schedule. Nor with the wish to know the people lying unfed and unattended in the remote villages, just with little rice to tell of what we have in the aftermath freedom these long years who even do not know it what freedom is actually. When did India become free? What in Parliament House? Who sitting then, who now? These concern them least as they have nothing to do with. He is also not there to see the uncaught, bloodies lights of sunsets catching the tall and white pillars of Parliament House. In a temple built new, the priest enjoys liberty whereas the gods seem to be hiding in the dark like an alien. This is not the ended of the story. The poet has something more to say. And apart from, each day he keeps looking for the light which but the shadows fail to contain in. Only freedom that he knows is the freedom of the body when it is alone. The lines are very meaningful: Trying to find the only freedom I know, the freedom of the body when it's alone. The fickle mind seems to be at work; the abnormal mind. Sometimes in abnormalities lies it the kernel of a great thought is the thing here. Geniuses are found to be with the streaks of abnormality which add to

A LITTLE distance from the waterfall By a small pool the yellow beachtowel lies On a long warm rock, and near it azaleas grow And the shadows of thin fish fall Across the speckled stones, and a light breeze blows Rippling the skin of the pool, first this way, then that. A blue-tailed lizard suns itself And we ourselves as the sun burns through a cloud Into the rocks, into our cold bones. Tired, tired, my mind melts in the sun. An ant crawls over my ankle. I sit up: there You lie, beautiful, half-nude on the white pebbles, Cream-coloured breasts open to the breeze and the sky And a few lines of silver hair in the brown To announce the burden of your twenty-eight years. To be chaste, how frustrating for minutes, How uncomplicated for days-to order fish, chives, To discuss the rats in our room when the morning gongs Sound out the monastery routine. To be Just friends, reverting in a richer vein To what we were, the way that we once were, The way I hope, for a while, we may remain. After six days, with nothing voiced, we are Unexpectant, companionable, Perhaps like an aging couple. We do not Even kiss goodnight yet wake to friendliness. It is perhaps the tiredness in my mind Or the fear of the structure set. Unsettledness Is what I have come to fear. We sit away From the noise of the waterfall, by a clear pool, Less conscious of the risk that is not worthwhile Than of the warm grey boulders and the slopes That circumscribe our peace, and the warmth of the sun Melting us into the stones, and the azaleas Mauve against a sea of pine. We are clueless as for what the poem is about. Is it about love and loving or the suppression of the fact at the internal level? Is it about friendship just as there is a female persona too with him and he is addressing to say the things of his heart? The things are happening just a little distance away from and he is watching it all with sensuality. Sometimes she comes and he likes to sit with

The Professor is one of the humorous poems of Nissim Ezekiel in which the poet mocks at the English of his retired colleague of the geography department. a retiree, he somehow carries on with his English. The poet listens to his words and caricatures the speech.

The Poetry Book 'Beyond Carnality: A Journey of a Bard to the Musical Paradise!' Chronicles the process of a soul from birth to baptism with music. Music engulfs the soul and it becomes the revelation of God to him! Once the soul finds everything Godly within the presence of music. Thus, the soul tends to mix up his existence with the melody that governs the universe. And then true emancipation takes place. Here, the solely personal experience of a man is inspired that tells how a man is accepted in this world; how he gains knowledge on the idea of religion, art, and culture, and how he transfers his all the knowledge in the creation like music. A soul driven by the urge to create the music finds every spiritual inspiration backing him and all the experiences help him shape every form of the creation.

Sarpa Satra by Arun Kolatkar retells the opening story of the Mahabharata, the snake sacrifice conducted by Janamejaya. Although, the Mahabharata has been an inspiration for many great works in Modern Indian literature, Kolatkar’s poem stands out among them for the way the poet uses the epic to bring out the issues that are specific to our times. The article explores how the tale of snake sacrifice done to exterminate the entire species of Nagas becomes an allegory for the poet to disturbingly ruminate the realpolitik of communalism.

Fire-Hymn is one of the best hymns ever written by Daruwalla who is not only a poet, but a novelist, a short story writer, a travelogue-writer and an anthologist too besides being an IPS officer who has worked in various capacities. One from Lahore, he is a Parsi by faith and upbringing, but an Indian writing in English. After serving the U.P., mainly the Terai regions and being posted in Delhi, he joined the RAW wing and worked as a Member of the National Minorities Commission. His first book of poems appeared from Writers' Workshop, Calcutta. A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award and the Padma award, Daruwalla is a modern Indo-Anglian poet so robust, bombastic, verbose, masculine and optimistic. Generally, disease, death and tragedy, loss, suffering, violence, bloodshed, curfew and tragedy are the code words of his poetry. To read the hymn is to know the Parsi texts, beliefs and rituals. To understand him is to cut the ice of the Parsi psyche, is to delve deep into the things archetypal and racial enough. To read him is to be reminded of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and the masculine toughness of Ted Hughes. As a poet, he is more inclined to tragedies, Greek, Shakespearean and so on. Fire-Hymn as a poem describes the scene of a ghat, a burning ghat near the river where the dead bodies are cremated, consigned to the flames. The poet visits the ghat and sees the bodies burnring or the the ashes with the embers within. He also sees the bodily parts and limbs while goign along the riverbank .

Enterprise is one of those poems of Nissim Ezekiel which really interest us as for the title starting as a business full of adventure, mutual transaction, trust and bonding, but fails it when the base fissures in some cracks and the establishment held in disbelief and skepticism. The context of the poem is one of united we stand, divided we fall or may be it disbelief and distrust intercepting the enterprise. The stakeholders forget it how they one day tried to put it up with their heart and soul, the same they have forgotten it over the stretch of time. The heart which it mends, the distrust shatters in at the indication of suspicion cropping in. Side by side the pilgrimage goes it parallel drawing from the allegorical meaning and metaphor. Nissim is confused in his presentation if to call it an enterprise or a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage of life or the collective business venture is it, what is it, remains in the dark and the poet has failed to clear it. The enterprise which was the edifice of collective human labour and bonding, trust and understanding established for the purpose of job, employment, benefit and sustenance collapsed it finally when suspicion made inroads, guilt took over, distrust shook the foundations so miserably, finally leading to the fall and tottering of the enterprise. The joint venture which flourished and prospered as a stance of collective labour, worth and excellence showed the good signs of progress and development. An enterprise was it, with its base stuck into the foundations deep of collective efforts, mutual relationship and joint venture, but the effort gnawed by suspicion and poisoned by envy, malice and misanthropy lasted it not long. The monument of human labour and economy crumbled it, leading its totter and fall from a height it has reached. The religiosity and goodness of vision it when they sat together to open an establishment, but failed it when suspicion started clawing it, injecting with the vials of poison. A venture which took so much of human endeavor and efforts failed it when fed upon the seeds of suspicion and mistrust. Finally, it tottered and crumbled like a pack of cards, the mansion remained it, but turned it into the bone of contention. The enterprise started it as a pilgrimage with the exalting minds, making the burdens light. The second stage explores the possibilities, but gives not the acid test. The sun beats down to match the rage of the entrepreneurs. Among them one takes a note of all that going within as a transaction. The things bought and sold are noted down as for to keep a record. But tragedy starts befalling when all others one by one starts deserting. The words of the sages are but other things to be taken a lesson from. How to cross the dessert patch is the thing to be discussed? A friend of them leaves on the midway whose handwriting had been good and used to write stylish prose. After he leaves the shadows start falling and foreshadowing. Another phase is reached when they are attacked twice and as thus they lose their liberty and freedom of speech. A section claims liberty and separates from. Finally, the things disintegrate and collapse, totter and fall down. The poet takes up the poem in such a way that he mixes them both, the enterprise and the pilgrimage. God knows, what sort of pilgrimage was it? Nissim Ezekiel actually quotes from The Waste Land, a Psalm of Life, Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening and so on to put the things metaphorically. The enterprise as a pilgrimage comes to a close with the pilgrims having returned back to their homes.

In the Introduction to the Viking anthology, Reasons for Belonging (2002), I presented the work of fourteen contemporary Anglophone Indian poets, active both in India and in the diaspora. Seven of these poets belong to what has been described as the "second generation of post-colonial Indian poets", who began to publish in the late 1980s; among the other seven are poets whose work came to public attention from the mid-1990s, as well as poets who represent the "advent of a third generation". In this Introduction, I indicated the shifts of historical context, aesthetic resources, and location, that distinguish these poets from their predecessors - emphasising the topography of an emerging cosmopolitanism that is restless, vexed, a work-in-progress. The Introduction also took early note of the shift in the location of the readership for Anglophone Indian poetry: "An important shift... has taken place in the sociology of Indian poetry in English. Its readership is no longer confined to the metropolitan centres, but is spread across the country, from Srinagar, Kalimpong and Cuttack to Hyderabad, Chidambaram and Calicut. This virtual constituency comes together in small local groups or in cyberspace, and on the subscription lists of journals." While I may have moved significantly away from some of the positions I took as an anthologist 15 years ago - especially in relation to the implied primacy of the metropolis over non-metropolitan locations - I would suggest that many of the observations and propositions advanced in this Introduction remain relevant to the study of Anglophone poetry in India, its diverse practices and ecologies.

This deeply insightful essay by Sri Aurobindo on the nature of poetry, was included as an appendix in the Nobel Prize Collection edition of Rabindranath Tagore's 'Lover's Gift and Crossing' (ed. Edouard d'Araille). Here is a quote from it that gives a taste of the quality of Aurobindo's deep and searching non-fiction prose: "In order to get a firm clue which we can follow fruitfully in retrospect and prospect concerning the topic we have proposed to ourselves, it will not be amiss to enquire what is the highest power we demand from poetry; or — let us put it more largely and get nearer the roots of the matter, — what may be the nature of poetry, its essential law, and how out of that arise: the possibility of its use as the mantra of the Real. Not that we need spend a vain effort in labouring to define anything so profound, elusive and indefinable as the breath of poetic creation; to take the myriad-stringed harp of Saraswati to pieces for the purpose of scientific analysis must always be a narrow and rather barren amusement. But we do stand in need of some guiding intuitions, some helpful descriptions which will serve to enlighten our search; and to fix in that way, not by definition, but by description , the essential things in poetry is neither an impossible , nor an unprofitable endeavour". - This original essay by Sri Aurobindo has been subjected to minor linguistic revisions by the editor of 'Lover's Gift and Crossing', Edouard d'Araille.

Joyjit Ghosh, "Unwinding Self: A Collections of Poems by Susheel Kumar
Sharma", JOURNAL OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, VIDYASAGAR UNIVERSITY, UGC-CARE Enlisted National Level Peer Reviewed Annual Journal, Volume 15 2022, pp.318-321, ISSN 0973-3671.

Jayanta Mahapatra is one of those poets of modern Indian English poetry whose bases are one of physics and the physicist-poet taking liberties with imagery, photography, penciled silhouette and word-play rather than literature, one of light and shade, astronomy and the origin of the universe, shadow space and random descent rather than poetical meaning and interpretation. As swayamvara and indradhanush words are so are his poetic images, flimsy and frail like the dawn light. His poetry is just like the gossamer and the sunlight falling upon. Why to mean them if these mean it not? As we used to see pictures in kaleidoscopes is the case with his poetry. Man is but a negative photograph. See the negatives and think of his poetry, the images shadowed and blackened. An X-ray plate will be the best answer. He does not write for the sake of meaning to be understood and these poems are not for the Indian readers, but for the foreign audience, as some have opined about his poetry rightly. Poetry as the images of life forms the crux of his poems. What it lies ahead who can but say it? What is it substantial in life? His poetry is a study in nothingness; the void around; a poet of inner and outer vacuum. Where are we going, what are we doing? We don't know is the answer. What is that lasts it here? Why does the same dawn break, the same twilight, the same morn, the same eve? Where does the light come from flashing? Where does darkness retreat back to finally? The universe is puzzling and life too riddled with uncertainties.

An Introduction is a poetical introduction of Kamala Das who is getting acquainted with the readers and critics of Indian English poetry through her dabbling in erotica, sexuality and confessionalism. As a writer, she is womanly as well as sexual.

The Felling Of A Banyan Tree is a poem in which the poet talks about how the old tree with the huge growth is finally pulled down as for clearing the site and making a new construction. but none came to mark and feel it the time and duration of it, its sustenance through the ages, centuries telling of an age gone-by, a time spent, never to come again, bearing in testimony to that, making us remember of the people loving under and growing by it. The father works as a catalyst and it is done in accordance with his wish. had it been the will the grandmother, she would not have perhaps allowed it. Side by side it comes to the mind, it is easy to cut a tree, but difficult to plant it, let it grow.

A Missing Person is a countryside woman delineated and depicted in the poem, telling of life and personae of the rural scape in reality. A Missing Person is not an artiste of a theatre or a so-called bar tender, a nautch girl or a devadasi, but a countryside rural woman living namelessly. A persona non-gratia, she does the household jobs and lives she namelessly. Had it been Burquawalli or Purdahwalli, it would have better. The bibi under the ghumta has the tales of her to tell. The Lakshmanrekha drawn out and circled need not be crossed as the courtyard of the house is the periphery round which moves it the life of a woman. Sad to refer in this context there had been the monstrous Sati system in the past. There was the child marriage system. Widows were not at allowed to marry again as they used to restrain themselves from. Even the women were not allowed to utter the names of their godly husbands. Sometimes the tattoo used to tell the name of the husband imprinted on the hand of the wife. Under these circumstances given, how to tell the story, depict the picture, flash the light upon, do the portrait of hers? To see it otherwise, A Missing Person is the Mona Lisa of Jayanta Mahapatra which he keeps portraying and silhouetting or maybe it The Last Duchess of Robert Browning whose photo lies it on the wall of with the smiles snatched and scrapped from her suspicious lips. But definitely she is not A Missing Person of Adil Jussawalla, the poetical text of his to make a way for into the realms of Indian English poesy nor is she the Adil Jussawalla the missing person of poetry who is re-surfacing after a 35-year break from creativity. She may be The Purdah Nashin of Sarojini Naidu. In the dark room a woman cannot find her reflection is the truth no doubt and that too in the villages of Indian countryside, mostly built from mud and haystacks, bamboos and straw-thatched though the rock-built temples may be for the gods and goddesses to house in. Even now those who build great mansions live in the shanty is the truth; the masons as daily wagers, labourers and workers which the foreigners startle to view it in utter surprise. The villages scattered and secluded, away from human haunt generally lurk in darkness and loneliness, gloominess spread all around. Without the post-office, the school, the library, the bazaar, is the reality to be envisaged. To study it all under that backdrop is the truth to be felt. If not of today, these were definitely the things of yesterday. Let us think of those times when there was the want, scarcity of resources, when there was no accessibility, there were no roads, connect-ways linking the countryside.

The present paper peeps into the poetry of Kamala Das where she mainly deals with the feminist voice and the 'women questions' of love. She talks about the unsentimental, uninhibited expression of love, sex, emotional sterility in marital relationship. She talks about the trials and tribulations of the woman who struggles hard to find a place in the male dominated society. In her poetry, she not only expresses her feminine sensibility but the unfulfilled desires lying dormant in the unconscious mind. Her candid confessional revelations give a new dimension to her poetry. She explores herself through self-introduction and self-analysis. This paper explores the female psyche where rests an anxiety to care for her 'self' and to carve a space for herself in the patriarchal society. It depicts the agony of woman's heart, her emotional insecurity and loneliness. The poetry of Kamala Das is remarkable for the woman's quest for freedom and demand for the status of a human being.

Jejuri, a sequence of 37 poems, is a social and cultural critique of 20 th century India and a manifestation of its modernist credo. It is a collection of short and long poems built around the objects seen and the experiences evoked in the protagonist on his visit to the pilgrim centre Jejuri. The poems evoke a sequence of images that unsettle the reader presenting the ambiguities of existence in modern life. It exposes the perturbed relationship of a modern sensitive individual with its religious culture. My attempt in this research paper is to capture this predicament of modern man over the loss of belief in religion, commercialization of rituals and spirituality, and mortification of science and technology. The protagonist is a city dweller who yearns for the view of country life and sets on his journey to the Khandoba temple of Jejuri. Jejuri is not a very sought after place apparent from the tarpaulin flaps and the rural folks. The state transport bus adds to the note of ordinary life. An old man with a caste mark is also travelling with the young man. The old man's destination and purpose is well defined by the caste mark. He is going on a spiritual journey. Caste mark can also be taken as a mark of distinction, division, exploitation on the

Style is nothing but formal constituents of poetry such as language, rhythm, diction, its sentence structure and syntax, the density and types of its figurative language and its rhetorical aims and devices. According to M.H. Abram, "Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose and verse-it is how a speaker or writer says whatever he says"1. In other words, it could also be said that the language, rhythm, thought, imagery, mood and attitude that a poet chooses, determine the style of his poem. But this choice itself is determined by the nature and quality of his genius and that of vision of reality, which has moved him to compose the poem, is the work of an art in question.
Form is also a part of style, it implies some kind of definiteness or coherence, and shape of some kind. Form could be of two types- Physical form and mental form. The physical form is the appearance on paper and, much more important, the sound of poetry. It may be either the sound when poetry is read to us, or the sound we mentally hear when we read it to ourselves. It includes: rhythm, rhyme, intonation and various kinds of echo and repetition. Mental form might be described as content in the usual sense of the word when applied to literature, it includes grammatical structure, logical sequence, the pattern of associations, the use of dominant image. All these things combine to give a good poem and its power over our imagination.
Peeran has carved out a style for himself. His expressions are very simple but powerful. The usage of syntax and rhyme scheme creates an impact on the mind of the readers, though he does not follow any set pattern regarding rhyme scheme. So, naturally, he gives more importance to the content than the structural form while expressing his thought. About his style Barnard Jackson writes, "A delightful collection by a writer who combines sincerity with craftsmanship a fine command of English"

Some of the poems of Nissim Ezekiel which appear frequently in the anthologies of poems or the courses of studies have been taken up to elaborate and elucidate upon the texts in hand in order to make our readings interesting enough. To Nissim, poetry is in irony, the caricature of men and manners. Let us see how he jokes and entertains and keeps us engaged.

A Rain of Rites is one of the best poetry-collections of Jayanta Mahapatra to be have been authored, taking him to the pedestals of international name and fame, really a standard overseas presentation, an admirable one for an Indian writer of verse. Dawn is the first poem with which the collection opens and we get attuned to the Mahapatrian imagery and word-play which is so easily available in his poetry. A Wordsworth reveling into the landscapes of solitary silence, strange quietude and solitude, he tells the things of Orissa. Village is the second to follow Dawn, really an excellent piece from him. Thereafter, the poems included in it, as such, Old Palaces, These Women, A Missing Person, Samsara, Five Indian Songs, A Rain of Rites, A Rain, Certainly, his is not an Indian view of life, but an alien insider writing the poems of such a verve and substance that one will think that these are not for the Indian reader and audience, but the foreigners and the international readers. The Indians may not understand as their faculties not so reasonable and logical, advanced and linguistical. Jayanta Mahapatra's English is that of a Christian missionary's, but the difference is in it that instead of being a convert Christian he has not on Christian matters, but confuses us with his Hindu view of life and physicist observations. This is for such a quality that he got his recognition in the West before being here. No other poet has understood Indian philosophy, economy and sociology as he has in his poetry. In the beginning when one tries to take, one may not like, but when one reads with his faculties open one will so lovingly. A Rain of Rites as a title for the whole series of poems included in it tells of a strange stillness, quietude, solitude rarely to be come across elsewhere scenic with the Indian country with mud-built houses scattered across a vast stretch of land, rivers, hills and trees, the landscape painted against the mythic past. A coastal state of the rains and rites, dotting it, it has a tale of own to tell, narrate and annotate. It is better to see his verses rather than studying for meaning, laying them bare. There is a strange serenity to be marked in the poems. Not the rains, but the rain of rites takes on frequently. The poet seeks to know who the first man was to whom the old cloud brought the blood to his face. There is nothing o take the rains or the rites seriously, as he takes to them privately for personal reflections. Ikons is extraordinarily beautiful as he takes to the Shiva lingam rarely described so far. We do not anyone who can in such a way as he has penetrated into our psyche and ethos joining through the myth of idolatry and breaking through iconoclasm. A poet of dawns and twilights he marvels us with his falling light and imagery. Where does it break from and retreat back to, is a mystery and there is no answer to it to resolve it. The poems of Jayanta Mahaptara are pictures and portraits drawn in silence and solitude on the canvas of nihilism and iconoclasm. What we say right, is it really? What we say wrong, is it really?

Literature has undergone a massive change with the course of the time. It holds the mirror up to nature. Environmental crisis is one of the major hazards encountered by the world today. Literature now addresses the current ecological crisis prevalent all around the globe. Ecocriticism has emerged as a new branch of study which observes the interrelationship between literature and environment. This paper aims at exploring the concern for nature and environment in Indian English poetry. The paper makes an ecocritical analysis of Indian poetry written in English and the diverse attitudes of the poets towards the environment and the need for conserving nature.

Of all literary traditions that have silhouetted the contours of modern Indian Poetry, the tradition of Bhakti poetry stands out pre-eminently from the rest; it provides a creative template out of which modern Indian English Poetry stems forth. In fact, the subversive poetics of the saint poets that characterises Bhakti poetry becomes a ready tool in the hands of many anti-establishment movements of contemporary Indian literature to critique the established hegemonic structures of the society that prevent a free play of creativity. It is in this context that we can locate the significance of Arun Kolatkar " s poetry. An extensive reading of contemporary Indian English Poetry reveals that no Indian English poet has internalised the sensibility of Bhakti tradition to the extent that Arun Kolatkar has in his works; such internalisation makes his poetry the most fascinating site to look for the contemporary manifestations of Bhakti. Hence, this paper attempts to explore the influence of Bhakti poetry on Arun Kolatkar, arguably the greatest Indian English poet, and seeks to delineate the way the spirit of Bhakti creeps into his poems while detailing the material world. Although Kolatkar is least interested in using poetry as a means to express the intense longing for a personal deity as the Bhakti poets did, his passionate devotion towards life matches the devotion of saints in its intensity. The paper, thus, attempts to bring out the quality of devotion that has an existence in Kolatkar " s poetry without any concrete references to God and religion. Modern Indian English poetry is marked by a passionate engagement with different Indian literary traditions. Of all the literary traditions that have shaped the sensibility of modern Indian English Poetry, Bhakti tradition stands pre-eminently for the way it shares the post-modern scepticism towards all forms of establishments and the refreshing perspective that it offers on the issues and

Enterprise by Nissim Ezekiel is an allegorical poem illustrating the pilgrimage of life described in terms of an enterprise started by a group of persons or call them stakeholders, but it in spite of its good run fails down as for the rift and fissures developed bringing it down ultimately

S L Peeran and Dr. Mashrique Jahan are the authors of this book. S L Peeran has appraised sixteen major Indian English Poets who have been acclaimed at National and International poetical scene. One Poet Dr. Krishna Srinivas was awarded Padma Bhusan for his contribution to Indian English Poetry.
Dr. Masrique Jahan has done her MPhil and PhD on the Poetry of S L Peeran.
The book is published by authorspress New Delhi and available with amazon.com

Indian Summer is not in reality a summer poem exactly, but something more added to privately and personally. Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet is not concerned with the summer, but his private reflection which he does so often. A poet of the country, especially Indian country and rural perspective, Jayanta is out and out an Oriya. It is summertime , the wind is blowing and the priests chanting appearing to be louder than ever. The mouth of India is opening. Perhaps the thing is different here. The country people generally take food after worshipping their deity in their homes or in temples. Food is generally cooked and taken late into the noontime. So the references seem to be closer to mantric incantation and the temple bells being tolled. On the one hand the heat and summer is baffling while on the other the priests keep reading the scriptures, offering rituals, saying the words of benediction, seeking blessing from and blowing conches. Such a thing is a general feature of Hindu homes. Food is cooked through the earthen oven fuelled by haystacks, logs, leaves and cow dung cakes. So it will definitely take time. There is also no certainty of cereals and grains being available in full. Want, scarcity and lack of resources are the things of the rural India. Today people can store and stock mechanically. In the past it was difficult to sustain. After the worship is over, the priests and others will take the midday meal and with it clicks the stories of hunger. Such is the intensity of heat that the crocodiles move into the waters. Against such a backdrop he does the thinking. But he grows personal when he refers his good wife being with him during the noonday dreaming, not exhausted at all by the deep roar of funeral pyres. The summer afternoon continues to be long, full of perspiration and sweating. It is also a truth the heat of the sun scorches it all. A small poem it impresses us with the words such as the mouth of India opens. The poet means to say it that India is India when full of Vedic incantation and Upanishadic recitation. When one lies queued to enter into the temple, the heat too hangs it not heavy upon. Over the soughing of the sombre wind priests chant louder than ever.

Simply because of the sheer excellence in choosing the most appropriate words to express his thoughts and the adroitness and ease with which he approached English language, one would often wonder whether A. K. Ramanujan could outdo even the native speakers. The focus of the present paper is to highlight into the amazingly brilliant mastery and flair of English language and the prodigious poetic creativity possessed by this great genius from India and to pinpoint how A. K. Ramanujan was bent on retelling the Indian Folktales to the whole wide world by dovetailing his language flair and poetic imagination together. The most amazing fact about A. K. Ramanujan is that he not only remained content with looking for the poetics of the tales, but he also literally poetized some of the most precious folktales, legends and myths. This will be the core of this paper and this will be achieved by analysing six of his poems and bringing out the special nuances of his English Language.

Hunger is one of the thoughtful poems ever written by Jayanta Mahapatara who is not merely an imagist, but a realist, a feminist, a modernist, a post-modernist and what not apart from being a nihilist, an existentialist and an iconoclast. Photography is his hidden love. Light and darkness the shades of his delving and he interprets in the form of creational sunrays falling and retreating so the images of life a study in silhouettes and shadows as seen through and opined. Poems come to him as photo-negatives to be washed for images. Nothing is what it seems to be and what seems to be is nothing. A poet whose subject is physics here describes in what it has been left untouched. Flesh trade and woman trafficking is the point of deliberation. How the situations of life, impoverished circumstances force one to be at the crossroads of life? The small fisher girl is the mute artist of the poem whereas there lie in some main protagonists. The father and the customer, their indirect exchanges add to the poem and make it gloomier. A woman's life, who knows it, what it in her palm lines? Where was she born, where will she go away? The crisscrosses of her fate-lines, who to foretell and predict it? Though the poem is of a confessional slant, we are not sure of who the unknown listener is in the poem with whom the fisherman is talking for an exchange of money for body business. A poem of human lust and hunger, carnal desire and affection, it bears out from his within with a view to possessing the body and satisfying the voluptuous greed. The weight of the flesh he could not resist it. The fisherman just by the way asked him if he liked to have her trailing the nets which a father should not have, but did he did as for making a livelihood with so much of struggles and suffering. The writerly protagonist followed him across the sprawling sands and his mind was engrossed in the flesh's desires and inclinations. When enquired about the ride or adventure, he actually wished to be with and it culminated finally. In the third stanza of the poem, the poet grows philosophical taking liberties with the language and escapades. He analyzes differently turning the persona impractical, holding it not responsible for, personifying. He tells of the poor shanty of the fisher man by the sea side made from haystacks, palm leaves and so on. In the last stanza, he relishes upon, enjoys the physical contact. A small girl was offered to and she gave in. The father went away to appear again. The sky seemed to be scrambling, fell upon with the deal struck down. The poem Hunger reminds us so many things, the life of the poor fisher men facing the furies of the sea, risking the life going to strike down in the sea. Even when the winds keep sighing by, foams and waves keep surging, they go down to fling the net and draw. Hunger as a poem reminds us of the flesh trade. J.M.Synge's Riders to the Sea too is very much like it though the context may be different. Hunger as a poem mesmerizes human hunger with the hunger of flesh. Why do people go to flesh trade? The human belly is at the root of all evils. The lust for the body too has not left behind man since the temptation and Adam and Eve and the resultant fall from heaven. What is most painful is this that the silent sufferer of the poem is the fisher girl, a teenager of just fifteen. She is not the speaker of the poem. The writer and the fisher man are themselves the spokesmen, speakers of the poem striking a deal.

The Professor Condoles is one of the most oft-discussed poems of Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla, a Parsi poet who was born in Lahore in British India but came to after the Partition and got educated in different schools and places, finally doing his M.A. from Ludhiana. An Indian Police Service officer, he using internal rhyme and curtal rhythm discusses tragedy and its elements, what an accident is, how the ingredients of it. In the present poem, the professor is condoling the eldest brother of the ill-fated boy.