About the Book

‘Thank God all men need not drink water from the same source’: this line from one of Gopal Honnalgere’s poems collected here is perhaps the most suggestive comment that can be made on these poems as they draw their ‘water’ from sources seldom used in the Indian poems in English we are generally familiar with. An act of retrieval as well as of love, this collection lights up an ill-lit by-lane seldom taken by the urbanised Indian poets in English : the Zen of  the Everyday and the Small: objects, insects, people, relationships. I read these in Malayalam where they were quite at home and so they will be, in any Indian language.

K. Satchidanandan