It’s often been claimed that poets wear ‘armour’, a shield against the scepticism and scorn of those who are bewildered by its contemporary form and against the vast hordes (‘the peanut-crunching crowd’, as one poet put it) who consider poetry a ‘hobby’, a pleasant but irrelevant ‘pastime’. Gieve Patel’s armour is of a different kind: his poetry is a defence against the genuine physical, and mental, anguish he has encountered as a practising GP in Mumbai.
23 June 2018
