Standing on the edge of a cliff behind poet Manohar Shetty's house and watching the sun dip into the cobalt Arabian Sea, it was difficult to believe "there is no intrinsic poetry in external beauty," as the poet wrote in his autobiographical essay 'Drifting on a High Tide'.
I visited Manohar Shetty in Dona Paula, on the outskirts of Panjim – where he has been living since he left Bombay as a young poet and editor – earlier that afternoon. We talked about poetry, Panjim and Bombay over tea and shrimp puffs. We leafed through poetry collections he took down from his shelves, penned mostly by the Bombay circle of bards, Shetty's friends and acquaintances from his days in the city.
In his creative career thus far, Shetty has published five books of poems. The titles are indicative of this poet's tendency to deal with his surroundings in the most immediate and intimate register: A Guarded Space (1981), Borrowed Time(1988), Domestic Creatures (1994), Personal Effects (2010), and Body Language (2012). A Homi Bhabha, Fundação Oriente and Senior Sahitya Akademi Fellow, Shetty's poetry has appeared in renowned literary magazines from the UK, USA and Australia, as well as in several anthologies, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), Eunice de Souza's Both Sides of the Sky: Post Independence Indian Poetry in English (2008), and Jeet Thayil's 60 Indian Poets (2008). His work has been translated into Italian, Finnish, German and Slovenian.
In Anniversary Poem, which closes the collection Personal Effects, Shetty maps his journey from Bombay to Goa by revisiting memories of himself as a creature "dreaming/ Of escape first into a neon/ Forest, then into colliding/ Waves, spindrift in the face." It had taken him several years before he could write poems that related directly to Goa: