Borderlines

Five years in the making, this is Manohar Shetty’s ninth book of poems, following Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1985-2017). 

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“Manohar Shetty’s poems have always been exquisitely sensitive to the presence of animals in our lives and our imagination, their proximity to us and yet also their mysteriousness. In his new collection, Borderlines, too, we encounter elephants and cobras, leopards and hawks, penguins and bats—and recognise ourselves, through the poet’s tender attentiveness, to be their fellow tenants of this planet. We are as vulnerable as they are, and not the sovereign species we have come to believe ourselves to be. Not that this delusion does not make an appearance in these adroitly crafted and finely phrased poems: Shetty demonstrates a shrewd familiarity with humankind’s fictions about itself. Hubris, flamboyance, the desire to conform, the rampant greed of states and corporations, politicised religiosity—Shetty skewers all these social and political foibles with wicked humour and pensive wisdom. Borderlines claims our attention with a hard-won quietness that is meditative, retrospective and elegiac. And yet, through oblique means that are far more effective than slogans, this book also summons us to action, to protect rivers rendered toxic, to restore fields mauled by mining, to repair social relationships damaged by rapacity. Manohar Shetty’s poetry has the power and resonance of the true witness.”
Ranjit Hoskote

“This poet’s eye misses nothing. Moments are fixed into place with a few deft strokes, as are we, amidst our vanity, our pride, and our brittle, fragile humanity. There is an expansive range of work in this collection, from poems that memorialise the everyday to poems of prophecy, where the future is already past, and ‘the tree / Did not deliver on its promise, / Giving us neither shelter / Nor sustenance––only fruit so rotten / Even the birds would not peck at it–– / The birds which circled above / When the waters rose so high / No country craft could survive.’”
Jeet Thayil

“Manohar Shetty, one of the now internationally famous Bombay poets, married a Goan and moved to Dona Paula, from where he has become a highly visible writer, editor and anthologist about Goan culture. His lyrical poetry is about the self and its many dealings with others such as family, relatives, and even the creatures that share our environment. His verse has the virtues of good prose, clear, unadorned, readable, economical. Looked at more closely, the verse is a chamber of harmonies made from rhymes, chimes, phonemes, similar end line sounds, near repetition separated by distance, with something recurring several lines later. The verse lines and stanza shapes are similarly irregularly regular, creating a feeling of unpredictable control and low-profiled craft.

“Shetty’s focus is on his awareness, whether of the duties owed to family, guilt of what was unsaid to the now dead, or his own ageing. Throughout his many volumes of poetry, there is consciousness of himself as a poet with imagination and some refinement distinct from more accepted social roles, such as athlete, wealthy, and famous. The boundaries between self and others are necessary to his being and his art. The boundaries—or borderlines—necessary to make him a poet separate him from others.”
Bruce King

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Manohar Shetty has published Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2017 (Speaking Tiger), bringing together his eight books of poems and some new work. His previous individual collections include Domestic Creatures (Oxford University Press, 1994), Morning Light (Copper Coin, 2016), Creatures Great and Small (Copper Coin, 2014) and Living Room (HarperCollins, 2014). His poems have appeared in the London Magazine, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Poetry Wales, Rattapallax, Fulcrum, Shenandoah, The Common, The Baffler, and several other magazines. He co-edited a special edition on English-language poets of India for Poetry Wales.

Several anthologies feature his work, notably The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), and anthologies edited by Eunice de Souza, Vilas Sarang and Jeet Thayil. His poems have been translated into Italian, Finnish, German, Greek, Croatian, Slovenian and Marathi. He has edited Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa (Penguin India, 1998), which has gone into several reprints, and Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century (Rupa, 2014). His latest anthology is The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told (Aleph, 2022).

Shetty has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Raza Foundation Fellow. He lives in Goa.