Collected Poems: In English

"Another tardy encounter, but somehow with Kolatkar that seems okay. Despite his prolific output, both in English and Marathi, he seems to have been extremely reluctant to publish except in small presses, so his poetry was always slow to arrive to all but his devoted circle of fellow poets and readers. But it’s well worth the wait, and this Collected Poems has the bonus of the poet Arvind Khrishna Mehrotra’s moving memoir and introduction. Kolatkar was born in 1931 in Kolaphur, but moved to Bombay at the age of eighteen and there he remained till his death in 2004. His poems, panoptic and casually incisive, are a celebration of the city’s seedy and burgeoning sprawl. Almost anywhere you open the book there are treasures of wry observation and breathtakingly inventive imagery. Just as one example, ‘Lice’, that compares with Rimbaud’s great poem on the same topic, has the speaker envious of a newly released prisoner who is being deloused by a beautiful girl in the street. In three cinematic sections, it starts with a description of the girl “like a stick of cinnamon . . . sitting on that concrete block/ as if it were a throne”, then dwells rancorously on “her dirty no-good lover” (“Just look at him, the yob…”) and in its final section enters the dreamy state of this undeserving youth as he drifts off, while her hands move through his hair, into “a mossy cave . . . booby trapped with rainbows,/ and hears the distant bark of police dogs.” This extraordinarily mobile and seemingly inexhaustible imagination can be heard throughout the book."