Personal Effects

“Manohar Shetty’s poems are pure delight, so much so that, because you want the pleasure to last, you read them slowly, one at a time, taking a mental walk after each. A spare richness marked his poems from the start and, over the decades, this hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the poems are even more burnished than before. They glow, and continue to do so long after the page has been turned, the book returned to the shelf. For those who still remember typewriters, how many would have made the connection between its keys and the ‘seats an / Empty stadium’? Or seeing a honeybee been reminded of ‘a billiard ball / Ricocheting aimlessly’? Occasionally, the glow of Shetty’s poems comes from an unflinching acceptance of the changes wrought by the passage of time, as when in ‘Termite’ he opens the closet and sees in the mirror both the ‘lofty / Temples’ and ‘rakish cleft’ he recognizes as his but also the ‘Tunnels of mud’ made by termites: ‘That’s you now: must, / Dryrot and sawdust.’ This is poetry so naturally memorable that you don’t need to consciously memorize it.”
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

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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.