Collected Poems

with stories, that crackle / like fire, stories of war that revolve / in your head.” This excerpt displays the essence of Krüger’s poetry at its crest, as that which exposes the boundless significance of our everyday existence. In doing this, Krüger forges an even more mutually dependent relationship between our days on earth and the relevance of poetry. Above all, this collection of lovingly translated poems followed by the German originals highlights the temporal as that which reveals the complexity of humanity ’s psyche. The showcased poems in this volume entwine these two arenas together so thoroughly that it is not only every day, but each moment in our days, which merge with verse. Andrea Bryant University of Oklahoma Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Collected Poems: 1969–2014. Gurgaon, Haryana. Penguin Books India. 2014. isbn 9780143420842 ArvindKrishnaMehrotra’slastpoetrycollection , before the one under review, was published almost twenty years ago. In the meantime , a significant number of “new poems” kept appearing in various anthologies, journals, and magazines. But when faithful readers, their appetite whetted by a volume of translations (Songs of Kabir, 2011) and one of essays (Partial Recall, 2012), were gearing up for a new book of verse, Penguin India (now Penguin Random House, part of the new global brand created by the merger of Bertelsmann and Pearson) decided to bring out a volume of collected poems instead. A marketing decision? Possibly, since it is hard to think of Mehrotra as a poet who has exhausted his creative vein and whose statements are mainly retrospective. Covering forty-five years of poetic activity, and including both original verse and translations, the book documents the unfolding and attuning of a poetic voice who is not only one of anglophone India’s most genuine and original but also one of the very few with an appreciative following abroad (mostly in America, although Mehrotra has lectured in England and is not unknown on the Continent, where some of his poems have been published in translation ). It opens with thirty-four “new” poems, which were written “not in the last year or two but in the last fifteen,” and continues with comprehensive selections from Mehrotra’s four books of verse: Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984), and The Transfiguring Places (1998). Arranged in the chronological order of their book publication, the poems chart Mehrotra’s distinctive progress from the seductions of surrealism (the discovery of which, he explains, helped “resolve the awful contradiction between the world I wanted to write about . . . and the language, English, I wanted to write in”) to the complex representations and the reverse perspectives of postmodernism and beyond. The exotic juxtapositions and combinations of apparently unrelated objects, images, and such—“The smell / Of ink and / The shape of / Wyoming ”—and the paratactic kaleidoscopies of the early poems find a more mature and technically accomplished expression in the poems from The Transfiguring Places on, which tend to be more openly, but also more intricately, autobiographical: “Back in the old house, / But I’m not back there yet, / And won’t be until June, / In the summer break.” The last third of the book consists of translations, without which Mehrotra’s poetic achievement would not be adequately represented. These include selections from The Absent Traveller: Prākrit Love Poetry from the Gāthāsaptaśatī of Sātavāhana Hāla (1991), dating from the first and second century CE; the already-mentioned Songs of Kabir, which re-creates in a sparkly idiomatic English the medieval Hindi of the Don Schofield In Lands Imagination Favors Dos Madres This collection of poems takes much of its inspiration and backdrop from the culture, geography, history, and literature of Greece, but with an American finale at once colorful and dark. Exploring themes of travel and loss, Don Schofield’s poetry resonates with carefully chosen words capable of evoking both profound thoughts and deep emotions (see WLT, Jan. 2014, 44). Les Plesko No Stopping Train Soft Skull Press The late Les Plesko uses the history of his native Hungary in this novel that follows a husband and wife through the pain and struggles of failed revolution and an emerging love triangle. The

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