'HAD I NOT BEEN A POET, I'D HAVE BEEN A MESS'

Jeet Thayil's latest collection of poems is about loss, ageing, and the recovery of the self. I'll Have It Here is his first book of poetry after 15 years and the death of his wife.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

Jeet Thayil is not done with his ghosts, but he has hung some of the pain out to dry. You dare place your hand and fingernail on it; it is only in a poem or two in I'll Have It Here (HarperCollins) that you can hear the poet howl. Thayil's latest collection of poems, which comes after the death of his wife Shakti Bhatt in 2007, is also a collection of ageing and recovery of the self, layered with time's stamp on the world. It comes after novels such as Narcopolis (2012), which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and a 2008 poetry collection, These Errors Are Correct—after the latter, he had said he would not write poetry again. That poetry has returned fiercely is evident in this collection, with the Thayilesque signatures intact. The poet is present and disappeared in the same poem. There are poems that build up like the hit of a drug high. There are poems that whisk you away into some cul-de-sac and then get you back in a room to look at the self, the nation, and the world. There is, for instance, a poem in which Gandhi is imagined as a house lizard, a poem on 'self-portrait as found in stockmarket headlines', a poem on what it means to make, among other things, poetry in today's India.

Excerpts from a conversation with Thayil on the kind of ride this collection has been.

"I was convinced there had been a break-up between poetry and me. Unwisely, I put this conviction into print, in the preface to a volume of collected poems..."

Why did you send this 'comeback' notice after a personal tragedy?