The distant bark of police dogs

Kala Ghoda poems (Pras, Rs 360) by Arun Kolatkar is a beautifully printed collection of poems by this brilliant contemporary Indian poet who writes in both Marathi and English. His most famous volume, Jejuri, won the Commonwealth Poetry Award. The Kala Ghoda Poems, some arranged in sequences, are taut, disturbing, often shocking poems, and are entirely cosmopolitan in their sensibility and idiom. “Her lover’s lousy head,/ pillowed on her thighs,/ has become a harp in her hands.// As her fairy fingers run through his hair,/ producing arpeggios of lice/ harmonics of nits,// as bangles softly tinkle over him,/ he drifts off and dreams/ that he’s holed up in a mossy cave// behind a story-telling waterfall/ booby-trapped with rainbows,/ and hears the distant bark of police dogs.”

GOA (HarperCollins, Rs 195) is part of a series of travel guides. It aims to showcase Goa to visitors with information on destinations, hotels, transportation and activities. Offering an insider’s perspective, it takes the reader off the beaten track to obscure places that delight the seasoned traveller looking for a holiday with a difference.

The cilappatikar- am: the tale of an anklet (Penguin, Rs 350) by Ilanko Atikal is R. Partha- sarathy’s translation into modern English verse of the 5th-century Tamil epic about Kannaki, her love for Kovalan and her eventual apotheosis into a goddess. Inspired by the work of A.K. Ramanujan, Parthasarathy offers not only a beautiful poem, but also a full, scholarly discussion of the poetics and other theoretical issues that arise from such a work and from translating it into English. The translator’s postscript is a model of linguistic and critical thoroughness, and there is also an immense bibliography of vernacular and English primary and critical works.

The penguin-landmark quiz book (Penguin, Rs 199) by Gautam Padmanabhan and Navin Jayakumar commemorates the Landmark Quiz which has been taking place in Chennai since 1988 and has now become a tradition, attracting a large number of “non-quizzers”. Every question in this book is designed for “a reasonably well-read person with an interest in general knowledge”. There are sections called Ask Jeeves, Loony Toons, Filmi Fare, Masala Mix and, inevitably, Page Three. In the Page Three section is the question, Who defended Aurobindo in the 1908 Alipore conspiracy case?

Gypsies: from the ganges to the thames (Hertfordshire, £9.99) by Donald Kenrick is an interesting and informative volume in a series of monographs published by the Gypsy Research Centre of the University René Descartes in Paris. Kenrick considers the theories regarding the origin of the gypsies, traces their journey from India to Constantinople, follows their route to the Balkans during the Ottoman period and into central and western Europe, where they passed themselves off as pilgrims and penitents and were welcomed as skilled musicians, acrobats and metal workers. He also looks at their distant relatives who stayed on in India and Iran. The final chapter explains how links are being forged between Europe’s last nomads and modern India. There is a valuable appendix on the Romani language and another on an account of Kannauj, the gypsies’ original home on the banks of the Ganges, by a controversial Romani linguist and activist.