KEKI N DARUWALLA

Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India’s foremost poets and writers. His ten volumes of poetry include Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead (winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, 1984), Landscapes (winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Award, Asia, 1987), Night River and The Map-maker. His first novel, For Pepper and Christ, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014. Most recently, he was honoured with the Poet Laureate award at the Tata Literature Live! Mumbai Litfest, 2017. His work has been translated into Spanish, Swedish, Magyar, German and Russian.

Anjali Purohit on Keki N. Daruwalla’s Landfall

To Think the Universe was Moved by Love

Landfall*, Keki N. Daruwalla’s latest book of poems merits reading and then several re-reads so one may mine the many riches that it holds. The vast canvas that these hundred and twenty pages cover is a testament to the exquisite finesse with which Keki can deliver his words, his unchallenged mastery over the craft, his incisive perception of our world and his ability to convey this deeply felt understanding through his verse. The wide sweep of this set of poems begins its travel from the rain-soaked Western ghats, through Ladakh, Cyprus and Salamis, across Alaska to achieve landfall at Canto X, thereafter, again returning to bear witness to the Black Death as also plagues of a different sort that afflict us even today. Keki’s poems are soft, delicate, sensitive, often melancholy, layered with an underlying irreverent wry wit, yet unsparingly razor sharp and searing when they need to make a comment on the tyrannies of our times.

Keki’s poems hold a deep empathy for nature, animals and people that live in harmony with nature. He speaks to the falcon and bald eagle, lynx and beaver, caribou, wolf, bear, squirrel, barbet and marmot as they align themselves to the freeze and thaw of the tundra.

He walks with the mother bear as she hauls her cubs over ice and icy water across a river ‘…which has gentled/ and flattened itself for the salmon to spawn…’ until she finds the salmon waters where she ‘…jumps/on scuttling salmon and scurrying brook,/crashes with her paws till she nabs the fish/and tears half of it off and throws it to her young.’

In his poem On the Blue Jay God, where he speaks about a book on forest dwellers that he had begun fifty years ago but abandoned, he takes an imaginary trip to these forests where he finds ‘…their curiosity about my fountain pen amusing:/’Words should be spoken, isn’t it,/why write them?’. ‘The whole thing would have been a breeze,’ he continues, ‘…writing those pages which memory misplaced./ Time is unforgiving./Why did I abandon the novel/about people who had lived with dusk/but had never seen a streetlight?’

In Keki’s poems, the shepherds being driven out of Agamemnon’s tomb on the mountains by the men in suits wonder, ‘…‘Why does he need such a tall/building to live in death?’ The suits only shout ‘Out!’ and the shepherds must move!

The book concludes with a brilliant set of poems, The Night Attendant that was written in the Covid years during which Keki himself was infected with the virus.

In the last poem quoted hereunder, Keki says, ‘No large words, please, am done with them…’. So, without adding even more words, click here for seven poems from Landfall.

Poems by Keki N. Daruwalla

Poems 2023

Of Near Absolutes

Leaves

The Architect Ruminates on the Wetlands

If There were a Goddess of Peace

There are Wars

She Said

Nothing Big

*Landfall, Keki N. Daruwalla, Speaking Tiger, 2023

Keki N. Daruwalla on his writing

“Keki Daruwalla, who is not restricted by any institutional or doctrinal baggage, writes serious novels and even more serious doggerel, and lives alone in Delhi.”