We poets are in the habit of bemoaning the current state of poetry, whether it’s our limited readership, the lack of interest from publishers, or some other woe responsible for our literary obscurity, so it is indeed encouraging to see the recent burst of anthologies of Indian poetry.
In 2008 was published Penguin India’s 60 Indian Poets and its larger, cognate volume, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, followed by Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (2012). The newest such offering, edited by poets Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo, is These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry. While the other collections focus on English poetry by Indians and the diaspora, this ambitious volume aims to represent Indian poetry in its full polyglot variety: English poems are in the minority, sharing space with poems written in a staggering range of Indian languages, from Sanskrit to Malayalam, Assamese to Sindhi....