I have grown up, hand on the primal bone,

Making the poem, taking the word from the stream,

Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone.

These lines capture the essential Dom Moraes (1938–2004) as a teenaged poet. His first collection, A Beginning , was published in 1957, when he was just 19. It won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for “the best work of imagination.” He was the youngest poet ever, the first non-English person, to win the prize.

As a teenager, I intuitively appreciated the inner cadences of Moraes’s words. I read him, as I read his contemporaries among postcolonial Anglophone poets — A.K. Ramanujan, Adil Jussawala, Keki Daruwala, and Gieve Patel. Nissim Ezekiel was a mentor to Moraes. But unlike the others, Moraes the individual remained a mystery until now.

Editor-poet-cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote demystifies Dom Moraes (originally Dominic Francis Moraes) through 80 selected poems from 11 collections over 50 years. In doing so, he reveals the mother-of-pearl hues within an alluring shell. Through Hoskote’s luminous intelligence, we re-read familiar poems more deeply, chance upon unknown ones more sensitively. The result? We redefine our understanding of Anglophone poetry.

En route, we home in on answers to decades-old questions. Did the volatile marriage of Moraes’s parents impact his poetry? Was he an Indian who lived in England, or a brown sahib born in our land? Was he a better reporter on the global South than a poet?

Both the creator and his creations come alive under Hoskote’s perceptive lens. His introduction enhances our reading many-fold; so do his end-notes. As readers, we agree that Moraes has been misread for too long as a belated Romantic. As each poem shimmers to life, we wonder at the intuitive cadences, poetic craft and global experiences that made Moraes a true ‘transcultural artist’.

Moraes’s Goan father, Frank Moraes, was one of India’s greatest newspaper editors. His Mumbai ‘East Indian’ mother, Beryl, was a pathologist, but her mental health did not allow her to achieve her potential.

Moraes published a book on cricket when he was just 13. By 21, with a fourth class ‘poet’s degree’ from Oxford, he was part of the English literary circle. He had personal equations with his childhood idols including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and T.S. Eliot.

An independent writer for Indian and British publications, Moraes had class. He reported on major news stories: former Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel, the Algerian uprising against the French in 1961, and the 1967 Six Day Middle East war. He investigated the underbelly of the Vietnam War in 1972, as he did Indonesian President Suharto’s dangerous penal colony of Buru. He traversed continents for the United Nations. Even those who knew little of Moraes’s poetry admired his sterling prose.

Who was Moraes deep within? In his 1992 memoir, Never at Home , the poet writes, “I felt English; my attitudes to life were English; whatever sense of humour I had was English; I thought myself accepted in England for whatever I was. It was not that, like a Jew in the Diaspora, I had to disguise my difference. The colour of my skin was not English, but my mind was.”

A seeker forever, Moraes could neither love his country nor his mother unequivocally. Perhaps the unresolved tension spurred his art, as in ‘Letter to my mother’ (1960):

“Your eyes are like mine.

When I last looked in them

I saw my whole country,

A defeated dream…

Hiding itself in prayers…

Your dream is desolate.

It calls me every day

But I cannot enter it.”

These warring identities permeate Moraes’s poetry, resulting in an unforgettable voice. We re-imagine the fragile poet as he emerges from a 17-year poetic drought in 1983:

“Smear out the last star.

No lights from the islands

Or hills. In the great square

The prolonged vowel of silence

Makes itself plainly heard.

Round the ghost of a headland

Clouds, leaves, shreds of bird

Eddy, hindering the wind…”

Delving into Moraes’s partly-unknown oeuvre, we encounter suffering, exile, and belonging through various avatars. For instance, in Absences , his unbridled imagination identifies with Babur, Merlin and Sinbad. The selections from John Nobody (1965), In Cinnamon Shade (2001), and Typed With One Finger (2003) are as extraordinary.

How come Hoskote has such empathy with Moraes? Perhaps because they met when the editor himself was a teenaged poet, in December 1986. Moraes proved a generous mentor, as he was to other young poets like Jeet Thayil and Vijay Nambisan.

This jewel-like collection is a meeting ground for two souls in sync, both imbued with poetic intelligence. That is the irresistible essence of its call.

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