In St Cyril Road and Other Poems, his first collection of verse, Amit Chaudhuri brings together many of the poems he has written over the last two decades. The early poems are permeated with a sense of place and an understated but powerful belief in the capacity of language to renovate our perceptions of the everyday—qualities we have now come to associate with Chaudhuri’s fiction. The later poems might be said to be about the heterogeneity and unpredictability of inspiration—a walk to the local medical store, a whiff of Old Spice aftershave, war in Iraq, voices overheard in a multi-storeyed building, a seasonal downpour, a Kashmiri apple … Luminous and redolent, these poems magnify our sense of the many worlds that form our past and present.
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