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.

About the Author
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 Kratli. His books of poetry include Bones and Distances (1968), Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).; Graziano Kratli 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.

Awards
Commended for Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2020.



Book Information
ISBN 9781784109257
Author Srinivas Rayaprol
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Carcanet Classics
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 16mm