Kirjahaku

Gathering the work of a lifetime, this Collected Poems - first published in India by Penguin, and, with additional poems, in Australia by Giramondo -is a comprehensive collection of his work from 1969 to 2016. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life - whether contemporary or historical - bring larger patterns into focus. Mehrotra's celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of the volume. Selections from The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry (1991) and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia. Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: 'In the staid world of Indian poetry in English [...] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called "cool".'

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's new book of poems, Book of Rahim, is his first collection of new poetry in twenty-five years. It contains extraordinary records of the everyday, as well as a frequent reimagining of history that makes it as commonplace as a relative or a piece of furniture, and all the more strange and unrepeatable because of that. These involve Mehrotra inhabiting the voice and time of an ageing Ghalib (author of a memorable diary reflecting on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857); his revisiting Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (1556-1627), a Baharlu Turk, an important figure in the Mughal nobility during the reigns of Akbar and Jehangir; and his discovery of objects and letters from his family home in Lahore. The result is a frayed immediacy that hefty historical novels find difficult to achieve. (Amit Chaudhuri)

A companion volume to 2023's Book of Rahim, this latest collection by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra offers recent poems, many of them from the lockdown period, written in the poet's garden - studies, as he says, in the way that artists sketch what is before them. And "Whatever else it may be, a book of poems is also a municipal registry of births, marriages and deaths. This book is no exception."