Poets are dramatists, self-dramatists,” Jeet Thayil tells us. “We draw into ourselves every possible bit of bombast. We make ourselves grander than we ought to be because we don’t want to disappear. We don’t want to die. We want to live forever. And so, we place ourselves inside a lineage that is very likely imaginary, and connects us not just to Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Eunice DeSouza but to Ovid, Emily Dickinson, and Rimbaud.” After having declared in a volume of collected poems that his 2008 work, These Errors are Correct, will be “the last full-length collection of poems” he’d ever publish, Thayil returned to the artform — fortunately for followers of his work — with his new book, I’ll Have it Here (HarperCollins India). Dedicated to three poets, he admits that he wrote the collection carrying “mostly gratitude” in his heart.

The book of poems is divided into three sections. As we read from the first to the last, the vision moves from the smaller details of the larger world to an eye that turns inward into the personal, the intimate. For instance, in the earlier section, in a poem titled Pet Sounds, Thayil glares at the champions of predominantly white music, who looked away from the artists singing from the peripheries: “You saw us only when you drove, /windows up, through certain neighbourhoods.” In another poem titled Lateral Violence Among the Model Minorities, he digs further into the reprehensible behaviour of the “predative” kinds within the oppressed communities, the “good” immigrants, the comfortably ideal minorities. He calls them the “satisfied or competitively middle class/when ranged among the paralysed natives.” This is the kind of poem one wouldn’t find elsewhere because Thayil’s politics does that. It takes a good hard look at the urban realities of the world.