My first reaction after finishing Manohar Shetty’s Morning Light was the fear of his name being lost like a beautiful tender leaf crushed beneath a pile of dried flowers that blossom only in winters. The second was the sadness of this already happening retrospectively, and the third was of being a responsible reader.

Manohar Shetty is a poet and a journalist who lives in Dona Paula, Goa. He is a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Sahitya Akademi Fellow who was born in Panchgani and studied at the University of Bombay. He has published seven books of poems, and his works have appeared in various journals and anthologies across the world, including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. His poems have been translated into Italian, Finnish, German, Slovenian and Marathi.

To read Manohar Shetty’s poems is to be completely mesmerized by his mature judgment in the choice of poems that make it to this collection and his authority as a poet from his sound selection of words and the economy with which he writes. Morning Light can easily be recorded as an experience where one sits for breakfast with the whispers from mortality: lives taken, lives lost, ‘lives spent fully, or ended sadly, swiftly’.