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The task of a poetry editor is both exciting and onerous. The most difficult genre to ‘judge’ for quality, poetry’s intimate and earnest vocabulary defies any fixed norms. While each poet is supremely individual, so is each reader, and therefore literary responses can be highly subjective. Nevertheless, if the incremental interest in this genre is to be systematized for public circulation, editors have to make choices within the amplitude confronting them. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, editors of the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, 2020-2021 have fulfilled their task admirably though it is a specially difficult year when the pandemic has thrown up poetry as a favoured instrument of self-healing.

Anton Chekhov, analysing the structural elements of a short story, says, ‘writing a short story, therefore, is to write what the characters do, not what they think, or say’ (Friedland 1890). While there is no autobiographical evidence of Chekhov’s influence on Mannu Bhandari’s artistic development, one can see a Chekovian resonance, a kind of literary parallel. In Vidya Pradhan’s rich selection of eighteen stories under review, Bhandari’s characters do negotiate things as they exist. Her narrative canvas substitutes abstract philosophizing with lived realities.

The canonical Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma (1907-1987) has to some extent suffered from being too revered. In well-meaning hagiography, she has been cast as overly pious, almost joyless in her asceticism for her art. In this context, Ruth Vanita’s attentive translation of Varma’s collection of sketches, My Family, has revitalized Varma as more spiritually buoyant, as someone deeply invested and in love with wider, larger, more spiralling notions of family and kinship—especially one that includes animal companions.

The number of celebrated poets and novelists who began their career reviewing books is probably much higher than is currently known. To start with, current literary culture, while being sustained invisibly by reviewing, is rather uncharitable towards the modest review. Writers too have colluded with this ethos and have tended to distance themselves from their own ‘jobbing work’ once they have achieved name and fame. Dr. Johnson of the eighteenth century was probably the last known writer of English literature who was as much of a ‘grandly generalizing sage’ as he was a ‘proletarianized hack’ (Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, p. 32.)