ABSTRACT
Poets, in contrast to urban cartographers, consider the city as the manifestation of the physical reality it encompasses, which incorporates an entire ‘personal history’. This personal history demonstrates how meticulously poems on cities participate in narratives of individual and collective urban space in order to further expand one’s knowledge and understanding of how cities might well be depicted and how one would use city space despite the structural constraints exerted by overarching socio-economic edicts. Thus, city poems incorporate both physical and geographical topography, as well as crimes; urban slums; the rich-poor split; and the psychological, geopolitical, and historical aspects that shape the urban space. Contemporary Indian poets’ writings in English are no exception, and Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma’s poetry collection Cities: Two Perspectives is the finest example of this. It’s worth noting that on Mumbai, poems will be composed repeatedly, and the first generation of poets create one such ambience around the metropolis that the subsequent generations of poets, like Lahiri and Sharma, not only become engrossed with it, but also extend the practice of composing poems on Mumbai.
