Reasons for Belonging brings together some of the most striking voices in contemporary Indian poetry in English. These poets are at home in the world. Most of them operate from India’s metropolitan centres, and their poetry reflects the formal assurance and urbane fluency of that position. They celebrate the possibilities of hybridity; they are cosmopolitan in their attitudes, and English is their first language of creative expression. Their poetry emerges from the metropolitan experience: speed, exchange, novelty, interplay, violence, solitude and isolation, and nostalgia for other regions and states of being. And their tones range from frenzy and anger through coolness to quietness and reflection. This anthology features most of the well-known poets, born between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, who belong to what has been described as the second generation of post-colonial Indian poets. But Hoskote pushes the envelope by including voices from the third generation—comprising 1950s- and 1960s-born poets whose work has come to public notice during the late 1990s, and poets born in the early 1970s. Together, they extend the scope, scale and modes of poetry, and its relationship with the world.
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