Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map: Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets offers an interesting showcase of the rich diversity of Indian English Poetry in the present times. Choosing to document voices from the various geographical regions of India and its fertile diaspora, this anthology brings together twenty poets bets and ten pieces by each of them, constituting an opulent spread of two hundred poems that will allow any reader of poetry a compound glimpse into the poetic mind of a language that is re(de)fining itself with every voice that claims it for its own.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Creatively and academically drawn to themes of gender and ecology, her four published books include a monograph and three collections of poems, the latest being Inhabiting (2022).A firm believer in the therapeutic power of verse, and in the classroom as an activist space for nurturing empathy, responsibility and syntony in young people through poetry, she loves, rebels, writes and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand.
Jaydeep Sarangi is a dedicated scholar of poetry and a widely anthologised poet with ten collections to his credit, the latest being, letters in lower case (2022) He has been dubbed as 'the bard of Dulung' for his poems on the rivulet Dulung and the people who reside on its banks. Sarangi is Principal at New Alipore College, Kolkata. He edits Teesta, a journal devoted to poetry and criticism on poetry. With Rob Harle he has edited eight anthologies of poems from Australia and India which are a great creative and literary link between the two nations.
Within the ontological fibre of a new anthology of poems, what aspirations stir? Apart from that naive aspiration to be held, loved and valued as a companion across life's diverse terrain and to be looked up to for nourishment, mentorship and support, an anthology of poems also entertains this activist aspiration to engender a new poetic community, a fresh dialogue on and with poetry, and a contemporary discourse on being-in-the-world. Every anthology envisions a conversation that has probably not taken place before and chooses to gather, in its pages, voices on a specific theme, genre, idea or intent.
As editors of this book, we must confess to a similar vision. Having long bonded together in our shared love for poetry, we were animated by the idea of an anthology that would bring some of our most enduring Indian English poets from across the length and breadth of the country and its diaspora together in an attempt to generate a synchronic conversation on the polyphonic identity of Indian English poetry.
It is not that such conversations were not extant or not in progress. Any average reader of poetry in India has substantial awareness of the boom in poetry anthologies in the Post-Pandemic world. However, the kind of anthology that we had in mind was a more intensive one that would showcase fewer poets and more poems with the hope of encouraging readers to embark on their own idiosyncratic and intimate conversations with every poet represented in the book. As poet-academics, we looked upon this initiative as a bridge to entice uninitiated readers into poetry and into academic work on it.
Thus, was born Mapping the Mind, Minding the Map: Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets, an anthology that brings together twenty poets and ten pieces by each of them, constituting an opulent spread of two hundred poems. The selection of a mere twenty poets from the rich present when there is an astonishing number of them writing with remarkable felicity and resplendent grace, can only be an extremely difficult task and riddled with its own limitations and injustices.
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist