BOOKS
Wince (Ragged Sky Press, 2022)
“Umit Singh Dhuga’s capacious imagination spans continents and history even as his fastidious language halts cliche at the border. In the resulting blend of distant gaze and intimate scrutiny, Wince is distinguished by the poise and precision of Dhuga’s poetic voice, a voice whose cosmopolitan irony accomodates both elegiac tenderness and moments of piercing beauty.”
— Rachel Hadas
“With dazzling wordplay and surprise turns, Umit Singh Dhuga offers superb poems on the theme of time in his new collection, Wince. Dhuga’s deft deliberations on daily life, from waking up to trying to sleep, from nakedness to regimental dress, wrest seeming opposites together. Haiku, sonnets, and terza rima transport the work through time and space: from Partition to Brexit, from London to Toronto, each poem a capsule filled with the furious energy of loss. Umit Singh Dhuga’s Wince is a subtle, stellar, timely meditation on life and death.”
— Molly Peacock
“Umit Singh Dhuga’s Wince is a virtuosic work. His voice weaves through poignance and playfulness to hold a various yet intimate world firmly together, chiefly in sonnets and sonnet cycles. It is a voice that is uniquely and memorably Dhuga’s.”
— George Szirtes
The Sight of a Goose Going Barefoot (Eyewear Publishing Ltd, 2017)
“Dhuga’s poems are elegant, beautifully made, full of love, pain, humour, and regret. His formal control is spiked with a colloquial ease that works now as elegy, now as irony. The voice works out of the classical tradition defined in our time by Auden, Brodsky, Wilbur, Hecht and Fenton and later writers such as Michael Donaghy and Don Paterson, but is authenticated by the keenly personal set in a broader cultural terrain. It is never comfortable or self-satisfied: it gives a full human shape to grief without surrendering to it.”
— George Szirtes
“U.S. Dhuga’s poems are as aphoristic as the Greek Anthology and Walter Savage Landor, but as delicate as Basho and Mina Loy. Dhuga entwines quick snatches of experience: places visited, sporting events lived out, love gained, lost, and revenant; rencontres both ephemeral and piercing, conducting us from a phantom New York to the taut contemporaneities of Canada to England to a vestigial India, in dazzling intimacies too deliquescent to name one truth but so on the rove as to pirouette around ‘interstitial shudders’.”
— Nicholas Birns
Choral Identity and the Chorus of Elders in Greek Tragedy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)
“In this provocative study, U.S. Dhuga challenges perceived views of the role of choruses of elders in Greek tragedy and illuminates the way that political context and the relation between ruler and subject defines their surprisingly varied identities.”
— Helene Foley
“The identity and role of the chorus is one of the central topics in the contemporary study of Greek tragedy, and this book makes an important and original contribution to the debate. Dhuga challenges the widely held view that choruses are socially marginal and excluded from political power. He focuses on choruses of old men and argues convincingly that they are not necessarily marginal because they are old. He offers thoughtful and sensitive analyses of five plays, with many new insights. The book is both scholarly and well written, with helpful summaries at the end of each chapter and a clear overall argument.”
— Michael Lloyd
Anthologies
The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020 (Véhicule Press, 2020)
Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry, both in Canada and around the world. The Montreal Prize Anthology 2020 explodes with talent, combining radiant vision with striking invention in form.
Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2019)
“Just as the formal verse is vitally contemporary and does not smell of the lamp, so are the prose poems engaged with life and not stuck in the avant-garde miasma which so often afflicts the genre. Umit Singh Dhuga also is an absolute master of form:
How many loads of laundry can I do
to pass the time until I might or might
not be hearing back again from you? (p. 135)
Dhuga is arguably one of the best poets of his generation in English today, and certainly the one whose formal achievement seems the most effortless.”
The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 (Faber & Faber, 2017)
“The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 showcases the best poetry published in the UK and Ireland over the previous year. It features all the shortlisted entries and highly commended poems from the coveted Forward Prizes for Poetry—now in their 26th year—and a foreword by the jury chair, Andrew Marr.
He and his fellow judges—the poets Mona Arshi and Ian Duhig, the poet-critic Sandeep Parmar and the artist Chris Riddell—considered 186 new poetry collections and 212 single poems before arriving at their selection.
This book, which places fresh voices alongside familiar names, is for everyone curious to learn more about the richness and variety of poetry today.”
The Poet’s Quest For God (Eyewear Publishing Ltd, 2016)
“This major anthology—the first of its kind—gathers work from over 300 contemporary poets from The United Kingdom, Ireland The United States, Canada, India, Australia and beyond. It is representative of poets from a wide variety of faiths—as well as agnostics and atheists. Featuring poems long and short, witty, questioning and inspiring, this is a book destined to be treasured as a gift, talking point, meditation aid and study guide for years to come.”
The Greek poets: Homer to the present (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010)
“Here is an anthology that is fundamental for any reader of poetry. . . . These poets are here in fresh translations by contemporary translators and poets, and they will be revelation enough for readers who do not know them. But what makes this anthology a paradigm-transforming event is the way it fills the silence of those two thousand years between Callimachus and Cavafy. . . What an arc, and what a book!”
— Robert Hass