“Manohar Shetty’s poems are pure delight, so much so that, because you want the pleasure to last, you read them slowly, one at a time, taking a mental walk after each. A spare richness marked his poems from the start and, over the decades, this hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the poems are even more burnished than before. They glow, and continue to do so long after the page has been turned, the book returned to the shelf. For those who still remember typewriters, how many would have made the connection between its keys and the ‘seats an / Empty stadium’? Or seeing a honeybee been reminded of ‘a billiard ball / Ricocheting aimlessly’? Occasionally, the glow of Shetty’s poems comes from an unflinching acceptance of the changes wrought by the passage of time, as when in ‘Termite’ he opens the closet and sees in the mirror both the ‘lofty / Temples’ and ‘rakish cleft’ he recognizes as his but also the ‘Tunnels of mud’ made by termites: ‘That’s you now: must, / Dryrot and sawdust.’ This is poetry so naturally memorable that you don’t need to consciously memorize it.”
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
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