Creatures Great and Small

Manohar’s Menagerie

Ever since the publication of his first book more than three decades ago, the animal kingdom has been intrinsic to the poetry of Manohar Shetty. Creatures great and small have long inhabited his poems—from the “yoyo” and “jiggling asterisk” of a spider to the “bowtie” of a “gowned” bat; from the “emerald embers” of fireflies trapped in glass jars to ants with their “bodies like puffed rice” and the statues of elephants “inlaid with their own ivory”. From “domestic creatures” such as the cockroach to holy “visitants” in the form of a cobra, this collection puts together Shetty’s menagerie culled from his five volumes of poetry with the bonus of a clutch of new, unpublished poems.

The birds and beasts peopling these pages are extended metaphors reflecting not only our own fraught, parallel lives, but about a natural world that needs to be preserved and treasured for its own sake. As Shetty puts it so memorably in the poem “Cheetah and Snow Leopard”, “it took an age for you / To shed your fur / And stand on two legs / But just a day or two / To ambush forever / The streaking arc / In the blurred forest”.

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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.