Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose

by Srinivas Rayaprol, Graziano Krätli (Editor), Vidyan Ravinthiran (Editor)

Overview

Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation

A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784109264
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	05/28/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	299 KB

About the Author

Srinivas Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Secunderabad. He studied at Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Banaras Hindu University before going to Stanford University from where he obtained a masters in Civil Engineering. While in the US, he started writing poetry in English and interacted closely with writers like William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters and James Laughlin. His correspondence with Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli. His books of poetry include Bones and Distances (1968), Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).
Vidyan Ravinthiran is an Associate Professor at Harvard University, and the author of two books of poetry, as well as Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.
Graziano Krätli is a translator, editor and author based in Connecticut, USA, where he works as a librarian at Yale University. He has published articles and reviews on literary subjects, particularly modern and contemporary anglophone literature in India, as well as articles on manuscript production, circulation and preservation in West Africa. He is the co-editor of The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa (2010) and the editor of Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018) and Random Harvest, the Indian edition of Rayaprol's selected poems and prose (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Preface 5

Note on the Text 13

Poems

Uncollected

The Rain 19

Untitled (Fragment) 19

Untitled 20

From Bones and Distances (1968)

Dogs in Ruin 21

Four Love Poems 22

Crabs in the Seine 24

Oranges on a Table 27

Letter to Ezra Pound 28

On Growing Old 29

A Letter for Mother 30

Les Saltimbanques 31

Bones and Distances 32

Poem for a Birthday 33

Here It Is Spring Again 34

Under the Bo-Tree 35

Legend 36

The Man Who Died of a Fever 38

Still Life 38

Pastorale 39

Yellow and Blue 40

The Blue Woman 41

For Another New Year 42

Portrait of a Mistress 43

To a Christian Lady 44

For a Nun in a Waiting Room 45

The Widow In Washington Square 46

The Peter Grimes of Benjamin Britten 47

Sometimes 48

From Married Love and Other Poems (1972)

Valdstejnska Hospada, Praha 49

A Taste for Death 50

Married Love 51

Middle Age 52

I Like the American Face 52

Gone Now 53

I Sit Here 54

Life Has Been 55

These Days 56

From Selected Poems (1995)

An Ordinary Life 57

10 Downing Street 58

The Golden Gate 59

Some Thoughts on Trees 60

Pictures at an Exhibition 62

You Can Die 63

The Dead 64

This Is Just to Say 64

I Do Not Grieve Every Time 65

A Funeral 66

I Am All that I Love 68

Sunrise over Kamareddy 69

All Kinds of Love 70

For Mulk Raj Anand 71

Nagarjunakonda 72

Poem 73

Godhuli Time 74

Diwali Days 75

My Son 77

Friendship 77

On Approaching Fifty 78

Shakuntala 79

Streets 81

Old Rain 82

For John Everyman, Poet 84

This Poem 86

To an Editor 87

Yesterday 88

It Rains Softly on the City 88

Opening Day… University of California 90

Portraits of America 91

Translations

The Train You Would Wish to Take 99

A Poem 99

Sad Voices 100

Call Me by a Name 101

Nobody, Nowhere 103

From Vishnuparijatamu 105

Jailhouse Clock 106

My Stricken Voice 107

Embers of Hope 108

Prose

City of Mine 113

Louis MacNeice: a meeting by the river 118

To Stanford 123

The Physics of Colour 130

Heart Condition 137

Remembering William Carlos Williams 141

Preface to Selected Poems 154

Notes 159

Afterword: Landscapes of the Heart 165

Index of Poem Titles 185