This month I'm proud to bring to you two exceptional Indian poets, Jeet Thayil and Arundhathi Subramaniam. They both live in Bombay and are not only poets of international repute, but also editors of important collections of contemporary Indian poetry.

If you have any comments or questions, please write me at poetryeditor-at-levantinecenter.org. I hope you enjoy these poems so much that you seek out more work by these fine poets.

—Sholeh Wolpé, LR Poetry editor

Jeet ThayilJeet Thayil, a poet, novelist and musician, is the author of four books of poems including These Errors Are Correct, and the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. He lives in Bombay.

Writes poet Vijay Seshadri of his work: "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."

Thayil's is a distinct and versatile poetic voice. His idiom is the result of a cosmopolitan blend of styles, and is yet, quite clearly, his own. The strength of this writing is that it has been able to locate that elusive, borderless terrain between the musical cadence and the spoken voice, between lyric power and intellectual rigor. Go here for poems.

 Arundhathi SubramaniamArundhathi Subramaniam (born 1967) is a poet, editor and cultural curator. She is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent being Where I Live: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Publishers, UK, 2009). She has co-edited an anthology of Indian love poems in English (Confronting Love, Penguin, 2005) and has written a prose work, The Book of Buddha (Penguin India, 2005). She divides her time between Bombay and a yoga centre in south India.

Her poetry has been published in anthologies and journals, and translated into several languages, including Hindi, Italian and Spanish. She was awarded the Raza Award for Poetry in 2009; the Charles Wallace Fellowship (2003) at the University of Stirling, Scotland; a Visiting Arts Fellowship to tour the UK on a series of poetry readings, organised by the Poetry Society, in 2006.

Go here for poems.