Author Description

Contemporary poetry tends to veer round overmuch on the urgency of articulating the experience in a language that's almost transparent to the point of being prosaic with pulsating vigor of colloquialism. In poetry, it's the image, or metaphor, that clicks as nothing else does, and it also holds the poem and the experience communicated so grippingly that it forms the inseparable component of verse libre. Modern American poetry, as the poetry written elsewhere, is bound to carry with it both experimental bravura and the experiential gravitas, and by doing so it remains acerbically cerebral in content and vision and acquires, in the process, the nuances of surrealism. Most of the poems that are here are against the backdrop of American formalism, though the experience communicated inevitably remains native. It's this cultural assimilation that results in the finest fusion of the two traditions, both American and Indian. Many of the poems thus celebrate that joyous assimilation that comes close to the American tradition of writing, particularly the images or metaphors that stand out as brilliantly articulated "artifices of eternity."