These Errors Are Correct

Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father TJS George a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years in Bombay Bangalore Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy <i>Narcopolis</i> was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems T<i>hese Errors Are Correct</i> won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India's National Academy of Letters) and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays poetry and short fiction have appeared in the <i>New York Review of Books</i> <i>Granta</i> <i>TLS</i> <i>Esquire</i> <i>The London Magazine</i> <i>The Guardian</i> and <i>Alexander</i> among other venues. His most recent novel is <i>Names of the Wome</i>n. He is the editor of <i>The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.</i> <p>A meditation on grief <i>These Errors are Correct</i> is Jeet Thayil's most intimate work to date. In poems of tenderness and rage time blurs into a continuous present visited by Billy the Kid the Buddha Lata Mangeshkar Jesus and Beethoven by unnamed protagonists for whom faith and addiction are interchangeable and by a remote god-like figure who will 'lick / your wound with his infected tongue'. A range of fixed and invented forms--rhymed syllabics terza rima ghazals sonnets the sestina the canzone stealth rhymes--make for a virtuosic haunting collection. Originally published in 2008 the book has been out of print since 2010. With illustrations by the author this new edition returns to the reader an essential and timeless book of poems. <i>These Errors are Correct</i> won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.<br><br>A collaboration between Jeet Thayil and The Burning Deck the track on the back flap appears as 'Aquatic' in <i>These Errors are Correct</i> and as 'The River Under the River' on The Burning Deck album <i>Where My Leaves Come to Rest</i>. You can find the music of The Burning Deck on Bandcamp/Soundcloud & Spotify.</p> 'I revel in Jeet Thayil's poetry. He seems to be one of the most contemporary writers I know and contemporary precisely because he has such command of the poetic and historical past and because his invented language has such depth archaeological richness and reality. The staying power here and the imaginative strength which allows the soul to be forever balanced on the cusp of the inner and outer worlds are nothing short of remarkable.' 'In these poems the theme of belonging is implicated in a variety of idiosyncratic ways: whether it's belonging to a drug (the thick sweet amaze of heroin) or to a tribe empowered by metaphor (it takes a lot / of cash to keep me / in the poverty to which I'm accustomed.); whether it's belonging to the hard-won zones between the local and the global between the spirit and the flesh or to the spaces between / thought and its correct / articulation. Thayil's poetry leaves the reader with a sense of danger of language teetering wildly on the edge of some precipice between centuries between continents between fleetingly improvised realms suspended somewhere between history and invention reality and nowhereness.' 'Take a walk around Jeet Thayil's brain-there's gold and grief in the shadows guarded by beautiful strange creatures nobody else has seen.' 'Jeet Thayil's work is quite simply the genuine article. I shake vigorously his hand.' '(O)ne of the most engaging voices you will read full of wisdom and regret.' 'Thayil's gift coupled with a deep undercurrent of experience makes it that rare book of poems where each one is worth going back to time after time. One of India's most talented poets Thayil experiments with ghazals sonnets and the canzone to create a body of work that is haunting distressing and beautiful; but not for the faint-hearted.' 'The poems in These Errors Are Correct are compressed varied in mood and scene but whether about history religion or some remembered disappointment concern complexities of love and fate. Thayil compresses occults and his imagery is allusive and literary. He writes with a powerful voice and density of language and he make me think even work . . . Revealing grand and self-dramatic. A major poet.' 'Splendidly structured both skillful and forceful.'