Book of Rahim

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's new book of poems, Book of Rahim, is his first collection of new poetry in twenty-five years. It contains extraordinary records of the everyday, as well as a frequent reimagining of history that makes it as commonplace as a relative or a piece of furniture, and all the more strange and unrepeatable because of that. These involve Mehrotra inhabiting the voice and time of an ageing Ghalib (author of a memorable diary reflecting on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857); his revisiting Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (1556-1627), a Baharlu Turk, an important figure in the Mughal nobility during the reigns of Akbar and Jehangir; and his discovery of objects and letters from his family home in Lahore. The result is a frayed immediacy that hefty historical novels find difficult to achieve. (Amit Chaudhuri)