Light grew less in his eyes and other poems

Poetry is product of an exquisite sensibility, the ability to respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences. Is there a sensibility unique to a country or its people, directly flowing from their cultural conscious? Apart from the poets own sensitivity to the influences around him, the sensibility relates to the people who form his milieu. An Indian poet writing in English will draw from his own cultural conscious and incorporate in his vision complex aesthetic influences working on him to produce poetry that relates to his people. Such work will still have some appeal to a global audience because the English that results is a unique creation of Western expression with Indian flavor. The myths that form the stuff of poetry may have been born in the Indian soil but its memes, defined as units of cultural expression, will always have something in them to appeal to a much wider audience. We do not have daffodils in India for a Bloomsbury poet to write poems about. But we have our own unique sensory influences to work upon. But essentially poetry remains a universal experience that is enjoyed by audiences anywhere in the world. The 175 -odd poems in this collection are rooted in Indian sensibility. The imagery used in them are reflective of the language patterns employed by the people of this country. Their recurring myths are familiar to an average Indian and do not warrant scholastic efforts to relate them to their context.