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Morning Light

Morning Light

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Clarity, precision and an undertone of irony have always been the cornerstones of Manohar Shetty’s poetry. In this, his seventh individual collection, Shetty extends the frontiers of his work to tackle political concerns and whisperings of mortality. The poems are replete with his trademark metaphors and similes: the new moon is “a thumbnail sketch”; oilslicks washed ashore are like “smudged mascara”; a fleeing snake “pours itself into a hole” and grieving eyes well up “Like a deserted street / After a sudden shower”.

Along with a cross-examination on the craft of poetry itself, Goa, his adopted home over the past forty years, is a lingering and evocative presence. Graced by verbal dexterity and subtlety, this is a substantial collection which values lucidity over willful obscurity and accessibility over ponderous complexity. Readers will find a responsive and echoing chord in Morning Light. As Shetty puts it, these poems are “A bequest with no return / Address—a piece of paper / Folded close to the heart”.

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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 MagazinePoetry ReviewWasafiriPoetry WalesRattapallaxFulcrumShenandoahThe CommonThe 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.

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