Selected Poems

About the Book: Selected Poems

This is the essential Dom Moraes. His top 80 poems. Look no further!

Fame visited the poet Dom Moraes (1938-2004) early, when his first book, which he published at nineteen, won the Hawthornden Prize. He went on to lead a richly diverse life as an international journalist, war correspondent, anthologist and editor. Chosen from the eleven published collections of Moraes poetry by the poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, this volume is the essential Moraes.

In the introduction to this first-ever editorial selection of Moraes poems, Hoskote proposes a new reading of his career, regarding him as an early but unrecognised transcultural artist. As against the better known Moraes who apprenticed himself to the Romantics, Hoskote emphasises the less familiar Moraes who offered fierce testimony to the twentieth centurys dramas of betrayal, slaughter and heroism.

About the Authors: Dom Moraes, Ranjit Hoskote

Dom Moraes (1938-2004) was one of the foundational figures of modern Anglophone poetry in India. His first book of poems, A Beginning, was published when he was nineteen; it won him the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. He published ten more collections of poems over a period of nearly five decades, including the highly praised volumes John Nobody and Serendip, and culminating in the posthumous Collected Poems 1954- 2004.

Ranjit Hoskote (born Bombay, 1969) is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. He is the author of more than twenty books, including I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics). Hoskotes poems have appeared in Akzente, Fulcrum, Green Integer Review, Iowa Review, Nthposition, Poetry Review (London), Wasafiri, and Wespennest, and in numerous anthologies, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and Language for a New Century.

Reviews

'A writer of abiding importance? one India's most enigmatic literary phenomena'-The Independent