Living Room: Poems

Ever since he published his first book of poems, A Guarded Space (1981), the trajectory of Manohar Shetty's poetry has gradually shifted from the intensely personal to embrace and encapsulate a wider and increasingly fractious world. Using dovetailing internal rhythms and his trademark offbeat metaphors, Shetty interweaves a hard-won lightness of touch with sardonic humour, a reinvention of Indian English and cutting irony to expose the scars of an iniquitous society, emerging, in the process, as a quiet but distinctive and resilient voice in contemporary English verse in India. This is a book to be savoured and treasured.