An authoritative selection of poems, some of them previously unpublished, from the oeuvre of late Kamala Das offers a unified perspective on the poetic achievement of one the country's most controversial women poets.
"Selected Poems", edited by academician-writer Devindra Kohli, traces the sources of the ferment of Das' poetry, and showcases its originality of style and its acts of resistance. Considered a major poet in English, Das' taboo-breaking work explores themes of love and betrayal, the corporeal and the spiritual, while celebrating female sexuality and remaining deeply rooted in her ancestral tradition and landscape.
She was one of the first Indian writers to explore sexual themes in her work, and her autobiography "My Story" (1976) was a candid recollection of her own sexual coming of age that was translated into 15 languages. Her bold writings often unsettled the orthodox readers.
This selection, brought out by Penguin Books India, has six published volumes and other uncollected and previously unpublished poems.
Her six published volumes are "Summer in Calcutta" (1965), "The Descendants" (1967), "The Old Playhouse and Other Poems" (1973), "Collected Poems Vol. I" (1984), "Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das" (1996) and "Encountering Kamala" (2007).
"In making this selection, I have followed the chronological order of the appearance of these poems in book form and, in some cases, in journals such as 'Kavya Bharati' and the 'Indian Literary Review'," says Kohli.
