Jayanta Mahapatra
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Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the best known Indian English poets. He also writes in Oriya. Mahapatra was born in 1928 in Cuttack, the city where he spent most of his lifetime. All his working life, he taught physics at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack.
Mahapatra has authored 16 books of poems. His poetry volumes include Relationship, Bare Face and Shadow Space. Mahapatra is a Sahitya Akademi awardee, and also a recipient of the Jacob Glatstein award conferred by Poetry magazine, Chicago. Besides poetry, he has experimented widely with myriad forms of prose. His lone published book of prose remains Green Gardener, an anthology of short stories. Mahapatra is also a distinguished editor and brings out a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga (http://www.chandrabhaga.cjb.net), from Cuttack. The last issue of Chandrabhaga (named after the river Chandrabhaga) will be released in November-December 2006.
By all standards, Mahapatra's tryst with the muse came rather late in life. He took to writing poetry when he was into his 40s. The publication of his first book of poems, Svayamvara and Other Poems, in 1971 was followed by the publication of Close The Sky Ten By Ten. One of Mahapatra's better remembered works is the long poem Relationship, for which he won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1981. He is the first Indian English Poet to bag the honour.
Besides being one of the most popular Indian poets of his generation, Mahapatra was also part of the trilogy of poets who laid the foundations of Indian English Poetry. He shared a special bond with A. K. Ramanujan, one the finest poets in the IEP tradition. Mahapatra is also different in not being a product of the Bombay school of poets. Over time, he has managed to carve a quiet, tranquail poetic voice of his own--distinctly different from those of his contemporaries. His wordy lyricism combined with authentic Indian themes put him in a league of his own.
In a way, Jayanta Mahapatra is not just an Indian English Poet. He is a school of poetry that has inspired many younger generation poets.
[edit] Books by Jayanta Mahapatra
Here is an incomplete list of books authored by Jayanta Mahapatra. These are not arranged in any specific order.
- Svayamvara and Other Poems
- Close the Sky Ten by Ten
- Relationship
- Bare Face
- Shadow Space
- The Green Gardener (Prose)
- A Father's Hours
- A Rain of Rites
- Life Signs
- Temple
Besides, JM's poems have been anthologized in the celebrated volumes of Indian poetry edited by R. Parthasarthy and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
