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
SELECTED POEMS
“Wince”. Cimarron Review. Issue 213. Fall 2020.
“Brexit Haiku”. The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020. Eds. Jordan Abel, et al. Montréal: Véhicule Press. 2020.
“You Master Form You Master Time”. Literary Review of Canada. April 2020.
“The Three Degrees”. Rattle. Poets Respond. 10 November 2019.
“Märchenbilder”. The Antigonish Review. Vol. 49.197-98. Spring/Summer 2019.
“A Future Edifice”. Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians. Ed. Sudeep Sen. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2019.
“Absent Tense”. Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians. Ed. Sudeep Sen. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2019.
“Time”. Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians. Ed. Sudeep Sen. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2019.
“Some Middle Distance”. Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians. Ed. Sudeep Sen. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2019.
“Philoctetes at the Physio”. The Common. Issue 13. May 2017.
“Philoctetes at the Gym”. The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. London: Faber & Faber. 2017.
“Fools Like Me.” In The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt, and Wonder. Eds. Todd Swift, Oliver V. Brennan, Dominic Bury. London: Eyewear Publishing. 2016.
“But the Rattle”. The Common Online. August Poetry Feature. 26 August 2016.
“Dacryostenosis”. The Common Online. August Poetry Feature. 26 August 2016.
“Providence, Providence”. Ocean State Review. Vol. 6.1. May 2016.
“Butler Library”. Ocean State Review. Vol. 5.1. May 2015.
“Sunchokes”. PN Review 219. Vol. 41.1. September/October 2014.
“I Took a Trip on a Train”. PN Review 219. Vol. 41.1. September/October 2014.
“The Sight of a Goose Going Barefoot”. PN Review 219. Vol. 41.1. September/October 2014.
“Odysseus Strings the Bow”. Verse translation from Homer’s Odyssey. In The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. Eds. Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, and Karen Van Dyck, with Introduction by Robert Hass. New York: Norton. 2010.
“Curtains”. The Southwest Review. Vol. 90.1. January 2005. Winner of the 2004 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.
“Umit Dhuga's attractive fondness for plotting and place-names in other of his poems than "Curtains" gives his work some of the drawing power of narrative without sacrificing the pithiness of lyric, a pithiness most brilliantly on display in the least plotted of his poems, "Curtains." A single long, sinuous sentence, artfully enjambed and rich with assonance, "Curtains" suggests a good deal more than it says, not least because the verb in the opening lines gives the dubious flavor of the conditional to the entire poem. There are no curtains at this window; thus the poem ponders reflection and takes as its title something lacking. Those windows and lenses, vividly evoked in themselves, manage without fuss to suggest a larger set of correspondences at play. It is somewhat rare for a single image or even vignette to be so loaded, and so elegantly unpacked, in eight lines.”
— Rachel Hadas, Judge
Southwest Review
2004 Morton Marr Poetry Prize
“An Achaean Suitor”. Arion. Vol. 12.2. Fall 2004.
“Etc.” The New Criterion. Vol. 22.11. September 2004.
“Railway Stations”. The Hudson Review. Vol. 57.1. Spring 2004.
“Lost and Found”. Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Vol. 27.1. January 2004.
“Nothing To Be Done”. Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Vol. 27.1. January 2004.