‘In the Light of Shiva’: HS Shivaprakash’s poetry from the last 50 years attests to his greatness

I remember, late on a July night in 1991, in the Mysuru Youth Hostel, in pouring rain and over roaring winds, Anvar Ali, a young student and poet, and I a middle-aged student and poet, coming across a young poet of slender build and big wide eyes, his hair dishevelled flying about like the Dancing Shiva’s, shouting to the heavens his mesmerising verse: “O Praanashakthi Devi.” That was HS Shivaprakash at the age of 37, admired by great poets like Gopala Krishna Adiga and many other senior poets of his time.

Within these 33 and a half years, HS Shivaprakash has become one of the greatest Kannada poets, and a major voice in Indian poetry, to borrow the words of Kamalakar Bhat.

The oeuvre of HS Shivaprakash

In the Light of Shiva: Selected Poems, a collection of Shivaprakash’s poetry in English translation by himself and Kamalakar Bhat and Manu V Devadevan, also carries his own original poems in English, making him a bilingual poet.

Here I would like to lay claim to at least two aspects of his poetic creativity I was privileged to be privy to: one, in his early experiments of writing poetry in English, he would compare notes with me about each one of...

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