Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.

Prizes

Commended for Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2020

'The imagistic lightness and sparseness of Rayaprol's writing is present throughout the book. Elsewhere there's a neo-Victorian sentimentality that, as Ravinthiran's excellent introduction points out, is a function of a colonial discourse and the inescapability of the English poet for Indian writers.'
Sandeep Parmar, PBS Spring 2020 Bulletin

'Rayaprol shapes the voices and traditions in his head into a new nest of words - smooth, nourishing, timelessly spring-like.'
Carol Rumens, 'Godhuli Time' Poem of the Week in The Guardian

'The selection is both a literary gift and an archival treasure, illuminating the work of a poet who was in many ways out of synch with his time... it is a poetry of glimpses and gestures, accompanied by moments of utter intensity that the reader will cherish.'
Emma Bird, The Poetry Review

'Angular Desire is a landmark anthology of modern Indian poetry... Rayaprol's poetry borrows, with a bee-like instinct, from various traditions, some homegrown, others imported... It is mobilised by Rayaprol's disquiet to find a language to represent all the possibilities of his present moment'
Mantra Mukim, Review 31

'Rayaprol's lyric voice is inflected by a thorny, sensuous turn of phrase... It is useful to think of Rayaprol grappling with the materials and structures available to him to fashion an idiom of his own... There is perspective and depth in his retrospective observations, a sense of a life lived and a quiet resolution, communicated as the poet looks back on the body of work he has produced'
Saba Ahmed, Poetry London

Srinivas Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Secunderabad. He studied at Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Banaras Hindu University before going to Stanford University from where he obtained a masters in Civil Engineering. While in the US, he started writing poetry in English and interacted closely with writers like William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters and James Laughlin. His correspondence with Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli. His books of poetry include Bones and Distances (1968), Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).; Graziano Krätli is a translator, editor and author based in Connecticut, USA, where he works as a librarian at Yale University. He has published articles and reviews on literary subjects, particularly modern and contemporary anglophone literature in India, as well as articles on manuscript production, circulation and preservation in West Africa. He is the co-editor of The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa (2010) and the editor of Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018) and Random Harvest, the Indian edition of Rayaprol's selected poems and prose (forthcoming).; Vidyan Ravinthiran is an Associate Professor at Harvard University, and the author of two books of poetry, as well as Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.