By Ashwani Kumar
Cities have long stirred the poet’s imagination, as sources of beauty, memory, and spaces of encounter, and estrangement. Invoking the radical aesthetics of land, language and landscape in The City under the City, John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil, two internationally acclaimed poets, invite us to embark on a haunting, lyrical voyage—a diasporic journey through cities and their mysterious inner geographies across the world. In a classic act of literary imagination—turning lived or imagined spatial realities into metaphors for the urban world—John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil explore how contemporary human identity is inseparable from the cities we’ve inhabited, not merely as physical spaces but as emotional landscapes and mnemonic languages etched into our inner lives. From Cavafy’s The City, Baudelaire’s The Spleen of Paris, Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Kamala Das’s Summer in Calcutta to Kedarnath Singh’s Banaras, the city in poetry is not a fixed geography but a textual construct, a surreal play of inner journey, “a leavening of the language of flowers: a rapacious read”.
Infused with nomadic spirit of friendship nurtured over years, these call-and-response poems in The City under the City were composed from scattered corners of the world wherever John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil happened to find themselves, both in time and in the ‘failure of time’. Thus, the poems, gathered from near and far, become meditations, memoirs, and messages, addressed to the larger human condition as Hannah Arendt so memorably evoked.
It seems only inevitable, then, that Jeet and John should ask, almost metonymically in their poem What We Are:
What are we if not
the cities we lived in?
The fearful doorways
we dreamed in,
windows (lit, unlit)
we were shamed in.
Sights plucked from us
died in the wrong air,
gone forever, no,
not forever, returned
plucked into words,
letters to the world
In this sense, John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil resist the very notion of individual authorship, disrupting the inherited metaphysics that positions the poet as a sovereign source of meaning. Their dialogic, itinerant poetics gesture toward an anti-Oedipal poetics—one where cities are ‘letters to the world’, and the poem becomes a terrain of shared displacement, like eros and errors flowing together without any geographical coordinates.
Indeed, cities are enigmatic, paradoxical spaces. You remain a stranger within them, never quite a native, an idealised, symbolic figure haunted by primordial fears and fantasies. That’s how a poet lives here: neither wholly claimed nor entirely lost, and making a home in those unhomely spaces where other people’s belongings and histories overlap. It’s no wonder, then, that John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil, in a confessional undertone, admit: “If a city isn’t part of me I’ve been part of a city.” Does it sound like a riddle? Yes— because this itinerant lyricism is forged in transit, moving between intimacy and estrangement, admitting that “we’re a ways from home. We’ll get there yet”!
In other words, tracing the margins and the marginalised through images both concrete and elusive, The City under the City maps a world of small cities, big cities, lost cities, metropolises—even ‘cities that are no longer with us’, and, believe me there is a ‘cow town’ too. And yet, there’s nothing foreign about Dublin, Delhi, Paris, Perth, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Dhaka, Helsinki, Jaffna, Amsterdam, New York, or Zurich here; they feel strangely ‘intimate’, oddly ‘familiar’, like a ‘Brussels Guava’. And these city poems also carry an old-world, colloquial charm, like something out of a blues lyric or a Beatles song playing in the neighbourhood. They conjure unexpected and unforgettable moments of intimacy and strangeness in striking images that leave you stunned. Consider this surreal chaos through bodily dislocation to urban belonging:
Love is a lonely vigil.
Hello, this is your navel.
These are your shoes.
The name of the city is Bombay.
(How Many Shopping Days Before Christmas?)
Remarkably, the poems in The City under the City stand out for what Susan Sontag famously called “transparence: experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are”. They are borderless fable; precise and expansive, imagistic, and intricate, woven into mini-epics of cities. What sets these poems apart are their shifting tonal registers, and visuals—half-lit celluloid illusions that thread together histories of countercultural hauntings and memories of place and time. If Jeet Thayil brings his signature lyrical intensity and intoxicating linguistic play, John Kinsella, in turn, illuminates these city poems with his austere and tactile descriptions of ecological erasure. Together, they forge a mesmerising, lilting dialogue where language shimmers like a diamond in the eye, and the city stands as a witness to saints and sinners. That’s why John and Jeet remind us:
Wherever I go, I’m followed
by cities, hollowed
by the old familiars
who brandish the old fears.
Around the corner, I might find
you, kneeling on cobbles, your mind
given over to rage,
your beauty forgotten by page.
(Exit/No Exit)
Admittedly, there are no ghettos, slums, or the eroticised lawlessness of crowd in these city poems. And yet, they linger as slyly sacred and shyly intimate memoirs, waiting to be gathered into the folds of an unbuttoned blouse of memory. Though cities have increasingly become spaces of alienation, and social fragmentation, yet for John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil, they remain alluringly seductive, and also addictive. So, here we are back to cities, relishing their beauty and betrayal—in fleeting gestures from the Simone de Beauvoir Bridge, in the blurry edges of Bloomsbury, even in the shaded quiet of Cambridge Botanical Gardens as John Kinsella muses in the poem Newton’s Apple Tree. You appear surprised? Try this hip-hop meditation on bare-bone intimacy in city life from the collection Letter to Ireland:
Long days, obese sun,
years short as life.
When night comes, and rain,
the world is a wife.
We are not strangers,
you and I,
strung with pain,
at opposite ends of a line.
No sea from here
but bright light
at midnight, bad air,
the birds in flight.
After reading poems in The City under the City
Leaving a city for good, like leaving a friend,
Is never easy. You’re grieving a friend.
Unnoticed you go, without fanfare, anonymous.
But the street’s alive, and heaving: a friend.
I have always been partial to a city with a river.
In this city without, I’m bereaving a friend.
In the prayer rooms the silence is deep and famous.
The believers are in a trance, conceiving a friend.
The air-raid sirens are busy blaring your name,
The skyline blames you, J &J, for deceiving a friend…
Ashwani Kumar is a poet, political scientist and professor. His most recent collection of poems is titled Map of Memories (Red River,2025). He lives in Mumbai and Mukteshwar.
Book details:
Title: The City under the City: Poems
Authors: John Kinsella & Jeet Thayil
Publisher: HarperCollins
Number of pages: 116
Price: Rs 499