Angular Desire

Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.

Srinivas Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Secunderabad. He studied at Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Banaras Hindu University before going to Stanford University from where he obtained a masters in Civil Engineering. While in the US, he started writing poetry in English and interacted closely with writers like William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters and James Laughlin. His correspondence with Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli. His books of poetry include Bones and Distances (1968), Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).