Description
This collection comprises poems published in The Home, the Friend and the World (1995), Jonah and the Whale (1995), Love’s Permission (1996), The Birdless Cage (1997) and Talking to the Djinns (1997). All 5 books were published by Writers Workshop.
Contents:
I. The Home, the Friend and the World: 42 poems
II. Jonah and the Whale: 44 poems
III. Love’s Permission: 42 poems
IV. The Birdless Cage: 41 poems
V. Talking to the Djinns: 33 poems
Hoshang Merchant is India’s pre-eminent voice of gay liberation. Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, he graduated in 1968 with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. On his mother’s side, he descends from a line of preachers and teachers.
Hoshang holds a master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA. At Purdue University, Indiana, USA, he specialized in the renaissance and modernism. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, USA, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran, and Jerusalem, where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left.
He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library, Dharamshala, India, and Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. He recently retired from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.
