Poetry Pick One for Eunice

This week’s poem is a tribute to Eunice de Souza, a legend to generations of her students at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and whom Jeet Thayil remembers as “poet, lover, curmudgeon”

As are we, ready to grow in lieu, wherever the grafts we brew. I remember the transplants I knew, the rooted uprooted, the damned-if-we-do, the sailor exiled to shore.

116pp, ₹499; HarperCollins (Courtesy the publisher)

I return the name of the stormto the Eunice remembered in this song: Eunice de Souza, poet, lover, curmudgeon, who rendered history to snapshot, theology to form,in one or two stanzas, a dozen lines, no more.

and invented a voice so sharp, sardonic and wrythree generations of poets took up her cry. But it was love she extracted from fury.Bombay’s almond leaf, impossible to bury, listing, landlocked, sailor.

- From The City under the City: Poems

Over a period of two years, John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil wrote call-and-response poems from whichever part of the world they happened to be in. This book tracks the poets’ engagement with various cities around the world, across the decades, in positive, negative and tangential ways, in recollection and in real time. This is poetry open to the experience of ‘foreign’ places, so that the foreign becomes immediate, intimate and familiar. Unexpected resonances occur, for it is also a work of addiction and recovery, of confrontation and meditation, and the understanding that if language is a virus, it is also the cure.

The City under the City is urgent and necessary reading, looking over and under, excavating memory for loss and revelation.