Angular Desire

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.

'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