Gathering the work of a lifetime, this Collected Poems - first published in India by Penguin, and, with additional poems, in Australia by Giramondo -is a comprehensive collection of his work from 1969 to 2016. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's poetry has long been known for its mixing of the commonplace and the strange, the autobiographical and the fabulous, in which the insignificant details of everyday life - whether contemporary or historical - bring larger patterns into focus. Mehrotra's celebrated translations from Indian languages (Prakrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) take up a third of the volume. Selections from The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry (1991) and Songs of Kabir are followed by those of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral, Pavankumar Jain and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Together they tell the story of Indian poetry over two millennia. Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: 'In the staid world of Indian poetry in English [...] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called "cool".'
