One of those happy souls

Fiery heart: the first life of leigh hunt (Pimlico, ? 9) by Nicholas Roe is a readable, but scholarly, biography of a forgotten Romantic. Descended from black Caribbeans and growing up a child of the American and French Revolutions, Hunt became a radical poet and journalist, whose periodical, The Examiner, not only published some of Keats?s most famous poems, but also campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. He was a ?dauntless moderniser? who called for parliamentary reform, freedom of press, sexual equality and liberty of conscience. Shelley described him as ?one of those happy souls/ Which are the salt of Earth, and without whom/ This world would smell like what it is ? a tomb...? ?He missed,? writes this biographer, ?the essential qualification for Romantic myth, an early death, and lived on to become ?the last survivor of a race of giants?.?

The harpercollins book of new indian fiction: contemporary writing in english (Rs 295) edited by Khushwant Singh is ? according to its editor ? ?a feast of Indian fiction in its dainty, delectable and easily digestible form?. The contributors are, among others, Githa Hariharan, Manjula Padmanabhan, Navtej Sarna, Samit Basu, Farrukh Dhondy, Shauna Singh Baldwin and Rana Dasgupta.

Rartial disclosure (Mantra, Rs 150) by Makarand Paranjape is a slim volume of poems, most of them about erotic heterosexual love. As the cover suggests, the presiding genius is the god, Krishna, although in a contemporary urban avatar. Paranjape blurs the lines between eroticism and mysticism, yet the poems seldom rise above banalities of utterance: ?When her fright in crossing the road/ made her cling to him,/ he found himself praying/ for the traffic to get worse.? ?Sweet Dish? is about a child?s arousal while watching three women cutting fruit for a salad in a ?clammy room? ? and it works. The poet pretends not to take himself very seriously as a lover, like Krishna in his erotic play, but he does end up taking himself very seriously indeed as a poet, and this results, unfortunately, in lines like the following: ?Of course, a woman?s body is an object of desire,/ but it is not the body itself which is desirable;/ rather, the idea of desire anticipated in the body enthrals.?