Cosmopolitician

Cosmopolitician is Mustansir Dalvi’s second book of poems in English. Like his first collection (brouhahas of cocks, Poetrywala, 2013) his gaze is panoramic, crossing landscapes with wanton purpose, compressing time and space into tight verse and extended narrative.

Dalvi uses many forms of poetry – from free verse to sonnets and villanelles – to immerse the reader into his dreamcity and his real world. Architectural ornament, buildings, arks, interiorscapes, sculpture and painting all elicit uncertain trajectories, which, in passing through the sieve of Dalvi’s memories and his use of language are reconfigured and refreshed. Nature and culture confront each other uneasily, mix osmotically and emerge as poetry. His many poems with female protagonists – the Didarganj Yakshi, the Maidens of Karyai, Sitt al Mulk, Murjana, even everywoman in a railway train – are all affirmative and politically aware.

Dalvi’s poems celebrate presence but keep a tongue firmly in cheek. No one is innocent. Everyone is invited to Dalvi’s kintsukuroi imagination – where broken shards reclaim former shapes with adhesive concoctions of gold, and of words.

REVIEWS & PRESS COVERAGE

Mustansir Dalvi’s dexterous poetry seeks a promise of cosmopolitanism from the reader

‘Cosmopolitician’: Eight poems by Mustansir Dalvi that merge dreams and reality