Poetry has few takers. Anthologies even fewer. However, publishers Permanent Black are brave enough to pay a tribute to Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet who died in December last year, by publishing his last volume of poems Rooms are Never Finished. At a literary event hosted by The New Yorker to benefit New York in the wake of 9/11, Amitav Ghosh read out Ali's poem Farewell (1997). Despair, be merciful, prayed the poet in his poem Who Am I After the Night of the Estranged "...Death, be a blessing on the stranger who sees the unseen more clearly than a reality that is no longer real." Publishers, take note.
Talking of publishers, there is a new one knocking at our doors. Three Essays is an outfit in South Delhi which has come up with this novel idea of publishing three, only three, essays on "issues of contemporary concern". But it breaks its norm in one of its first books: The Present in Delhi's Pasts by Sunil Kumar. It has four essays. Delhi and its past, after all, deserve more.
As for the present, Shahjahanabad is making headlines for reasons purely literary. Unesco has declared the city as the World's Capital of Books for the year 2003.
