These Errors Are Correct

by Jeet Thayil

A meditation on grief, These Errors are Correct 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. These Errors are Correct won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.

Genres: Poetry

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Jeet Thayil (born 1959 in Kerala) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize 2013.

Reviews

[Ashok Krishna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I am not gonna' pretend that I liked or even understood many of the poems in this collection. There is neither the spiritual shades of Tagore nor the soulful calls of Gibran. Neither the plain word bliss of Gulzar nor the fleshy rawness of a Kamala Das. Most of these poems sound like a poet wrote to impress the reader than to express his soul. Having started this work with huge expectations, especially after reading Jeet's wonderful work of 'Names of the Women' I am utterly disappointed. 😑

[Arya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lacklustre lines, lacking depth and constrained in a single dimension. A vain song of death and life.

[Kartik Chauhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is something like a fracture in the poems—like looking at the world through broken eye-glasses—which is incredibly shocking at times, but unfortunately inaccessible at others. Ultimately a very moving collection, but I also feel I need to return to it later in life to discover more depth.

[Suyash Jha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forget the sea let it fade.... Is one of the most poignant pieces of poetry I've ever read

[Aparna Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whatever little I understand of poetry, I know from the first sentence of the first stanza of the first poem that this is beautiful. It is about grief, nostalgia, the opposite of nostalgia, need, drugs, recovery, but most of all, it is about love lost and tragedy. So many snippets of different scenes of the world can be seen in the corners of these poems, all mixed together with vulnerable moments of people in the poet’s life and head. If you read the sentences, you’re filled with a strange sense of sadness - almost bittersweet, because every tragic rendition is also visceral and beautiful, so lovely you have to stop reading and gather your wits. If words are currency for a poet, Jeet Thayil is very rich - and very beautiful.

[A V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeet’s poems feel deeply Kafkaesque. The grief he versifies is raw, livid, frozen, and painfully intimate. His inner poetic universe seems to shiver under the weight of his loss, yet he remains remarkably political. In his world, nothing is inconsequential, every person and particle plays a role on his grand stage. His poetry connects the unfamiliar, drawing lines across timelines to show how decades can wound each other.

[Bhavya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sweet nothings here and there!