topics: |  poetry | india | english | [manohar | bk | svc | 08nov | rs280]

Under Orion (1970),
Apparitions in April (1971),
Crossing of Rivers (1976),
Winter Poems (1980),
Keeper of the Dead (1982),
Landscapes (1987),
A Summer of Tigers (1995),
Night River (2000),
The Map-Maker (2002),
along with New Poems (2000-2005).

From Hindu review (A vast canvas, M.S. Nagarajan)
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/07/02/stories/2006070200130300.htm:
   How sad that this 355-page volume, published by Penguin India, does not
   have the essential features one expects in a book. It does not carry a
   preface, introduction, page of contents, index, or even a simple title
   page.

His gentle satire comes off in the short poem "Draupadi":

	The travails of Draupadi
	are never-ending.
	It seems— some people have it
	in their bleeding stars:
	first exploited by the Pandavas,
	five to one,
	then by the Kauravas,
	hundred to one
	and now by the feminists
	in millions.

"Boat-ride along the Ganga", casts a wry look at the contradictions that
abound in the life of a Hindu:
	What plane of destiny have I arrived at
	where corpse-fires and cooking-fires
	burn side by side?

Daruwalla's sweep is breathtaking: be it mythologies, Greek and Hindu, social
or political problems, personal relationships, he is most at home. And so is
the case in the employment of verse medium: blank verse, free verse, heroic
couplet, terza rima. Poems such as "Nurse and Sentinel", "The Happy Woman
Speaks", "Love in Meerut", "The Mistress", "Don't Expect", "Living on
Hyphens" stand out for their memorability.

As a rule, every Indian poet stretches and strains for achieving
effect. Daruwalla, one must concede, is no exception. Everything is said to
the point of exhaustion: there is no void for imagination to fill in. The
hallmark of good poetry is suggestion (dhvani): it half reveals and half
conceals.