It comes to this critic in a haze; a distant memory of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra reading poetry to a class of English literature graduates in the making, two decades ago. The memory returns on account of novelist Amit Chaudhuri’s introduction to this collection, which quotes Mehrotra’s own introduction to a book of essays from a few years ago.

Collected Poems: 1969-2014, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Penguin, Rs 399. Available at leading bookstores.