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Both of the current New Walk pamphlets:
* ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA, GHALIB: A DIARY (NWE 23.1)
Ghalib has been called ‘one of the most subtle and complex minds of the Indian nineteenth century’. In Dastanbūy (Nosegay), written in 1857 and 1858, he reflects on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Ghalib, A Diary draws on an English translation of the original Persian and also, formally, on Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama. The result is a narrative immediate in its telling, and at once particular and universal in its predicaments.
"Over the past fifty years, his writing life has progressed through a series of experiments in borrowing. Like a hermit crab he has moved from shell to shell, though, unlike the actual crabs, he has consciously chosen his various abodes, rather than chanced upon them and he has also never simply outgrown them, since each borrowed idiom has left its mark on his own." Peter D. McDonald
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven books of poetry and two collections of essays, and has also done a lot of translation work. His Selected Poems and Translations was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry, and his Collected Poems (not including Ghalib, A Diary) was published by Shearsman this year.
* HUGO WILLIAMS, THE WEST PIER (NWE 23.2)
The West Pier is a lyrical sketchbook of the poet’s life so far, mixing present and past reflections of his theatrical family with his own prep school campaigns and later amorous sorties. A teenage brush with Swinging London in the company of Guinness heir Tara Browne, who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ is the traumatic transition to adult life and marriage in pre-gentrified Islington, one time haunt of his hero Sir Walter Raleigh. Williams has lived in Raleigh Street for fifty years and he lovingly conjures the poet from the surviving fireplace of a local pub.
The sequence is shaped and shadowed by the “leaving faces” of friends and the heinous arson of Brighton’s West Pier, where he played as a child and went on early dates.
"It is the gallantry of his writing that moves, the raffish intelligence that makes all his poetry a pleasure to read." Kate Kellaway, Observer
"One of Britain’s most accomplished and distinctive poets." Kathryn Maris
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and since then has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy’s Rain won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published in 2002. In 2004 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
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