"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

Likewise, Gieve Patel being born in 1940 in the city of Mumbai. He was educated at St Xavier's High School and Grant Medical College. He lives in Mumbai where he is a general practitioner. His works include Poems that were previously launched by Nissim Ezekiel followed by How Do You Withstand, Body and Mirrored Mirroring. Also some plays include Princes, Savaksa and Mr Behram.

He led his first show in Mumbai in 1966 that went on to have several major exhibitions in India and abroad. Patel participated in the Menton Biemale, France in 1976. India, Myth and Reality, Oxford in 1982; Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy, London 1982. Patel belongs to avant-garde grouping of artists based in Bombay and Baroda.

He has also exhibited for Contemporary Indian Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1985, Indian Art from the Herwitz collection Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, 1985, and 'Coups de Coeur' Geneva, 1987. He has been conducting a poetry workshop in Rishi Valley School for over a decade. He also edited a collection of poetry which was published in 2006. Over three decades and three volumes of poetry, Gieve Patel has acquired a distinctive voice, ranging across a scale from detached but sharp observation through tolerant skepticism to controlled vehemence. Generally the poems were spare and lean of shape, gesture, and movement, their originality a matter of quick, unexpected figurative turns and complex attitudes ("the odour of genitals … a hair's breath from decay"!). His steady-eyed appraisal of the disorienting and the disquieting confronts experience without evasion or overinvolvement:

"I am not kissing leper sores. / Merely working my way to suggest / It might have been better / Not to look away" (In the Open). In the abjure facile resolutions, being generally concerned to note an honest ambivalence in their responses to people and situations. His first volume, Poems, is characterized by a concern expressed with an economy of restraint. Accosted on each annual return to his home village by the begging persistence of an old woman, he remarked in "Nargol".

Kavishala presents famous poetry from Gieve Patel :

On Killing A Tree

It takes much time to kill a tree,

Not a simple jab of the knife

Will do it. It has grown

Slowly consuming the earth,

Rising out of it, feeding

Upon its crust, absorbing

Years of sunlight, air, water,

And out of its leprous hide

Sprouting leaves.

So hack and chop