The Cut-Off Point Poems

The Cut-Off Point Poems

by Keshav Malik

Keshav Malik has published eight volumes of poetry, one of prose, and edited five anthologies of poetry in translation from Indian languages into English. His own poems have been widely translated into several Indian and foreign languages.

After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree, Malik studied art history in Italy and France on cultural scholarships for several years. On his return home to India he edited Thought a weekly, Indian Literature, a bi-monthly, and Art & Poetry, a quarterly. He now edits the poetry bulletin of the Poetry Society (India), and is also the art reviewer of a leading newspaper - The Times of India, New Delhi.

In 1961, when Keshav Malik's first volume was published, V.S. Pritchett, the doyen of literary critics, writing about his poems in London's New Statesman said: 'Each one crisp as a thermometer reading.' 'Definite contribution to a new intellectual frontier' was how the Bombay quarterly Quest described Malik's art. His successive volumes of poems have confirmed the power and profundity of his poetic vision. This new volume shows him to be a man who has terrible and touching things that have to be said, and an unmistakable voice in which to say them. The book testifies to the increasing maturity of his poetry. Certainly, he is among the most memorable poets now writing in the English language.