With a Newground publication, there is no need for the embarrassed wariness with which one normally confronts the Slim First Collection. Newground is a group of young poet-publishers who are careful about what they commit to print. Like other poets they have published (Santan Rodrigues, Eunice de Souza, Saleem Peeradina), Manohar Shetty makes poems seriously, and has honed away at his productions for six years before offering up this spare collection.
The book is in two parts. The first consists of poems recognizably culled from the untidy semi-urban world which has become a mindscape for so many of Bombay’s poets. The island itself, ‘pounded thin, veins splayed/To the sea’s rim’; the well, presumably in the backyard; the pigeon, presumably dirtying the ledge; the tree in the compound which is cut down, the local lunatic, the train journey to work. The poems in the second half are addressed to a woman, at various stages of a crumbling affair. In one or two of them, it is the woman who speaks the poem.