The Poet in Vikram Seth's 'Summer Requiem'

It is that time of the year when brown leaves carpet morning walks, making us ponder on the fragility of life. Longer nights mean more time with one’s self and dark hours of contemplation in the undisturbed company of memory. Autumn is upon us and we sit surrounded by its moods. Vikram Seth’s poetry collection ‘Summer Requiem’ is not just a seasonally suitable book to read but one which makes the reader find herself somewhere within its folds of poetic musing, watching the orange dusk. Because ‘sombre thoughts become this hour, Hour of red copper, rust, dark iron’ (from ‘Summer Requiem’). 

The overarching idea in Vikram Seth’s poetry is that of transience – of seasons, of love in relationships and of life itself. We see the poet, at home or in the world, looking around at shifting scenes and poring within with thoughts of change, and even death. Observation and contemplation unite to create vivid visuals which add profundity even to the usual. And the poet? A man whose streams of thought, whether flowing backwards in time or surging ahead, seem poignantly lonely in a crowd. However, the low notes of remembrance of things gone by are in peaceful symphony with those positive ones reflective of acceptance of this very impermanence around; a flux which impresses itself upon the poet’s mind as he bids adieu to summer. 

Love…

Outside the great world’s gifts and harms

There must be somewhere I can go

To rest within a lover’s arms,

At ease with the impending snow. 

(From ‘Late Light’)

In the poem ‘Summer Requiem’, the poet knows that ‘I must forsake attachment.’ We wonder why. We see the world around him gradually turning leaden from rust, bringing ‘everything to a close’. It’s a closure to the day or to the season. And it seems the poet too has reached a finale in his life. He’s looking to be detached because ‘where the lock of longing was opened, There there will be a perpetual wound.’ 

A love lost, or one never found? 

I love you more than I can say.

Try as I do, it hasn’t gone away.

I hoped it would once, and I hope so still.

Someday, I’m sure, it will.

No glimpse, no news, no name will stir me then.

But when? But when?

(From ‘What’s in it?’)

A lover lost it is, then. Though not the love. How so? 

‘Caged’ describes the torment of the poet feeling ‘dispossessed’ with the partner while being still in love. A relationship bitter and ‘bent on staggering on’ with a perpetual question in the estranged poet’s head – ‘Why could this not wait till our love could die?’ Togetherness is not equal to happiness, and a string of communication lies snapped in ‘A Winter Room’ too. Reminds the reader of modern, urban relationships.

It is this that makes you sense the poet’s loneliness even in moments of richly described solitude.

My friends have left, and I can see

No one, and no one will appear.

This must be happiness, to be

Sitting alone with birds and beer.

(From ‘Evening Scene from my Table’)

The ‘must be’ in the third line marks a tentative insistence on being happy. He seems unsure if he prefers the company of solitude, even though this theme is recurrent. Is that why many poems contain references to muses, friends, lovers and memories, ‘gathered and scattered’? And, is that why there is a turning to Nature, a calming company to his musing soul, though reminding him continuously of his waning life? 

Nature

Vikram Seth is not a Romantic poet. While his sense of ‘I’ is remarkably real, divinity is not what he sees when he views trees and beaches, birds and sunsets. However, faint strokes of similarity can be seen between the poet’s and William Wordsworth’s relationship with nature. They both drew solace in its lap; learnt to value it when they were away from it. And as a result of this reminiscing, they both learnt to appreciate the role of memory. 

When, sniveling on my grieving knees,

I’d feed the College tortoise peas,

The torpid glutton, on the whole,

Poured balm on my afflicted soul.

(From ‘Fellows’ Garden’)

Just what a beautifully visual ‘One Morning’ reveals how ‘as I breathed the callous air, I lost the drift of my despair.’ ‘Red Rock’ describes that beach’s scene, the waves and toddlers and ‘Three dolphins ballet in the din, In bottle-nosed felicity.’ The poet wishes it would always be like this. But it cannot be this warm forever, can it? 

‘Next year I’ll freeze, though God knows where.

In Shimla, fingernumbed and scowling,

In New York on a chilblained street,

In London with the North wind howling

Or vile Vienna in the sleet.

Yet I’ll be warm wherever I go

If Red Rock burns beneath the snow.’

And that is the role of memory in ‘Summer Requiem’. It is ‘a poison’ that reminds the poet of the absences yet at the same time it makes him remember warmer, joyful times. Both triggered by Nature and calmed by it too. It is this theme that lends the book lush visuals, giving its readers ‘The sense of privilege’ that the poet himself felt in ‘Suzhou Canal on a June Night’.

Nature does another thing, as summer bids adieu. It becomes a personification of the poet’s own being. Of a man believing he stands in his twilight, already. These collected poems thus become a continuous, and rather personal, contemplation of life and death.

Ageing … and beyond

There is a heavy note that lines the poet’s voice (say in the poem ‘Summer Requiem’) born out of a realization that ‘everything learnt has been trivial’. There is a coming to terms with the truth of life, that ‘Perpetual replacement is the only song of the world’. Of waking up one morning to see how …

My joints have rusted and my brain is lead.

I drank too much last night …

My love has gone. What do I have instead? –

Hot-water bottle, God and teddy bear.

I find I simply cannot get out of bed.’

(From ‘Can’t’)

As summer makes way for autumn, ‘The Yellow Leaves’ glint, making the poet wonder ‘What is this heaviness that won’t unclench my heart, My work by day, my spirit nightly?’. Life is ‘this ungiving game that waits till it or I am finished.’ The mood is somber, and death a constant unnamed refrain.

‘Alone, I wander where I choose,

And soon there will not be a me to lose.’

(From ‘Which Way?’)

The pathetic fallacy of watching summer turn to bitterness in his own being is unmistakable.

But a sense of hope twinkles …

In the ‘Summer Requiem’, you cannot separate the art from the artist. The poet is a part of his surroundings, almost one with them with his moods and memories. Like one organic whole.

Bright darkness is my comfort,

Dark daylight is my friend

And even I can’t reckon

Where I subsist or end.

(From ‘Bright Darkness’)

While there is a proclivity to harp on loss and disintegration, the reader cannot see the poet as separate from his landscape – and cannot see him dead and gone. Because that would mean the world collapsing too. Perhaps, the poet knows that. He wants to be. His memories of the summers gone fill his eyes, make faces appear, make him confess ‘To the Moon’ how ‘it gives me pleasure to remember and to count the stages of my sorrow.’ The voices in his head whisper in ‘Late at Night’ how ‘Live you must, for we must too, And we have no home but you.’ And he wants to house them. Resolves with ‘I must’ are oft repeated in his poems, even if it is that ‘I simply must get out of bed, And press that reset button in my head’ (from ‘Can’t’).

Shakespeare knew ‘The Readiness is all’. In the poet’s mind this idea resides, with the wish to ‘sleep dreamlessly’. This acceptance of change, of life’s flux by the poet adds serenity to his thoughts, even if a feeling of pure contentment seems to evade him, as yet. That there is a world beyond this empty one is what he wants to believe. And love in that world is what he is hopeful about. Death, then, is but one stop in the full circle of life. But till then, like in the ‘Parrots at Sunset’, he does 'give uncertain thanks, For the one world I’ll get.’ This book can thus be seen as Vikram Seth’s attempt to simply ‘turn the hourglass to re-sieve its sands, a fragile monument half-built by hands.’ 

A letting go and yet holding on…but not a swan song. No.

Somewhere in the valleys of interpretation that ‘Summer Requiem’ creates we find the poet wandering, and us readers wondering alongside. Thus luring us into shared intimacy with his mind, Vikram Seth in his latest collection of poetry traverses moods with soulful ease and unreels panoramas of landscapes – of change in both the outside world and the labyrinths within. While each poem stands apart from the other (and not just in rhyme scheme) one can choose to view them as a continuous contemplation of life and its vagaries, connecting birds with stars and themes with dreams as one reads on. 

Timeless poetry that you can turn to, again and again, to see something anew every time you do. 

'Summer Requiem' by Vikram Seth is published by Aleph Book Company, 2015.

[Review was commissioned by the publisher. Views are my own.]

Book Review – Writing by the Window by Nivedita N

In a publishing world where the latest design technology is at the service of book covers, holding Nivedita N’s ‘Writing by the Window’ is like fresh air from humbler, simpler times. In a lot of ways this cover, especially created for Nivedita by her friends and lying beautiful in understated elegance, is symbolic of her whole collection. Her poetry, like this image, is free from ornate attention-seeking frills. Her poetry is also, like the inception of this cover, a result of her home and her world coming together to inspire her pen. 

‘Writing by the Window’ is a slim collection of poetry, prose and what she calls ‘phroetry’ – Photo + poetry or photo + prose. An experiment with mixed media, so to say. There is no one, predominant, theme which binds the 33 pieces in the book into a bundle. Neither is there a common message that the poet is trying to bring forth. While there is a logical progression of thought in each piece, keeping the content’s flow smooth, the book evades recognizable patterns of rhythm and meter and aims to keep much use of figure of speech at bay too. In short, Nivedita’s book is trying to stand apart from others in its genre. 

Nivedita is viewing things like we do sitting by a window. You see the outside world while you also see the inside of the home, simultaneously. This becomes her thematic foundation. A lot of her poems delve into the personal domain – of grandparents and relationships, old friends and friend’s mothers. Love, in all its human forms, hence comes through as a theme in many of her poems. Equally prevalent in the book is her voice speaking up for those on the margins; from the unconventionally pretty to the conventionally overlooked. Nivedita also gives political expression to topical goings-on in Andhra Pradesh, rooting her voice in a socio-cultural context.

The very personal 

‘Why did you swallow the last breath, Grandpa?’ reflects a personally felt intensity, with a picture taken from her ammamma’s album. Nivedita questions her grandfather why he did not trick death; why he left her grandmother longing … 

‘even today. At times, she unties her hair

and stands in the vacant balcony

under the moonlit sky

and looks up, plays with her hair

And in that moment of time,

She looks so old yet so young.’

‘His Mother’ is another poem I liked, which liltingly marries the idea of infancy to old age, wrinkled fate lines to those ‘very light’ ones on a child’s hands. Growing up and growing old become the two sides of the same coin in a mother-child relationship. And then the final irony of life and death …

‘i carry her on my shoulders to the

burial ground

she is tired, dead.

as a child,

i played monkey on her back,

giggled, chuckled, till she said

“dead tired”.

New is replacing the old, and old is making way for the new. The poems are pregnant with a looking back, ‘To reminisce what we lost when we embarked to gain’. ‘Arjun’, a deeply introspective piece sees her delving within herself in the garb of a man ‘President – Baalshiksha Foundation’, torn between the aspired values of doing something worthwhile and acquired skills that we call professions, asking:

‘Where do I belong?

Here, where my mind lies? Or

There? Where people are wise?

Where do I belong?

Here, where people want me? Or

There? Where I am supposed to be?

Through musing and reflecting, introspecting and questioning, Nivedita’s personal poems are an attempt to understand and then portray – the minds of those departed, the lives of those left behind, the everyday that is common to all our homes and finally, what it means to love. 

Love

Myriad forms of love find expression. ‘In the Land of Krishna’ sits a widow, head tonsured, famished for pleasures, suffering willingly. And in the poet’s home lives her father, pushing away ritualistic suffering from his just-widowed mother, ‘demanded sensitivity’ for his mother when she lost her “Kanha”. The mother? Blushing like Radha eating jalebis, her husband’s favourite, with the ever-observant poet spying at her from behind a curtain. Beautifully visual piece!

‘Caged Love’ sees Nivedita asking herself if we wrongly call them love birds. And then as if to quell the question and make love inexplicable ...

‘when the green one died, the other gasped for breath

and then

The one in blue

lost its breath too. How?’

There is the typical lingering-longing love waiting at the platforms and taboo love between a Brahmin boy and a Dom girl, both ‘born out of making love’ but shunned for choosing a different other; a love busy ‘Listening to heart’s verses, the Gods silenced the curses.’ Much like in ‘Jogwa’ where the lovers’ worlds are full of ‘potholes’, and their minds with questions - ‘why should I serve the Almighty butchering a life gifted by him?’ Let love flourish beyond man-made walls because ... 

‘It felt divine

More divine than what we

are forced to do in the name of divinity.’

And then, how can there not be love that inspires writing? The cheeky poet has stolen a Telugu dictionary to ‘double the choices’ of words to express herself for a someone special and then 'in the pursuit of finding an apt word to describe you, I found another world for you!’ ; a world? A Telugu book shop, fast becoming obsolete. 

The ‘you’ in so many poems remains a charmingly enigmatic beloved we are told nothing about. While I felt the mythological poems lacking in a power that resurrecting epics can carry, the idea of redefining love in ‘Draupadi and Krishna’ deserves mention. 

Voice for the unconventional 

In the quietest of tones, Nivedita has dedicated a few poems to speak for or about things we force into silence. Over two pages of prose, Nivedita sets about to make a case for Bougainvillae over roses, and thus academically for Writing over Maths and Sciences. The narration celebrates unconventionality – of looks and choices. As does ‘Wild Flower’ which is ‘untamed, raw and unkempt’ and ‘Gattu’, with the freedom of exuberance which comes from rolling in the cesspool,  'and become clean from within.’

‘Gabbilam [bat]’ stands by bats, ‘Blamed! Named!’ reminding the reader of socially discriminating attitudes and ‘labelled symbols of disgust’. A symbolically sound poem, ‘Menstrual Cycle of the Pen’, portrays a marriage though a paper and pen, where 

‘Says the shy pen “No! Not even in the night.”

the pen is too embarrassed to explain.

Upset, the paper rolls itself and sulks;

The pen holds its rib and cries in pain.’

But the pen in ‘Stubborn Pen’ is more courageous and the poem a representation of writer’s block. 'Unbound, it refuses to be a puppet’and her pen does not want to write. It says:

‘Benevolently, I’ve spilled over papers

But now, with my own refill I’ve had a fight

We strike. We do not wish to write!’

Those on the margins of the world are being given a voice. But rebellion is brewing in the poet's own home turf!

Political

Nivedita is observing, sometimes with a contained anger but mostly calmly, what changes in regimes mean, for instance, to the ‘Middle Class Poet’ to whom ‘It matters … if Congress or Telugu Desam rules, for the power cuts are frequent under Congress’ rule’. A beautifully telling poem ‘Hyderabadi Pigeons’ lays bare Nivedita’s mind through the pigeons' eyes. ‘As AP Dies’ about Andhra’s funeral as it stood divided is rife with latent rage this State-personified felt, in its own words in this poem, 

‘I saw my lawyer come and embrace one and all

and get down to business right away

money was distributed to the pundits

and the calculator moaned

as it was pressed hard

even my relatives mourned, louder now.’

Points I ponder about …

... and there have been some keeping me busy. Hopefully, Nivedita will not ask me as she does the world in a poem – ‘Who allowed the self-appointed editors the freedom to preach?’ Perhaps then I will have to meet her for tea and over ‘Tea(Chai)’ too, 

‘… … Arguing

Talking

Dirtier the glass, tastier it gets!

Making promises to change the world;

for a while, our own worlds we forget!

Come, let’s together have some tea –

one spoon sugar for me

how sweet would you want it to be?’

I enjoyed Nivedita’s poetry for its simplicity (though not for the stray editorial errors that sneaked into a few poems). It attempts to speak like a friend does over tea, to be understood instantly, and to be felt unpretentiously. While complex use of poetic figures of speech was not attempted and thus can’t be admired, the idea behind the writing of each poem shone through, because of how Nivedita chose to express and also because of the photographs and footnotes in parenthesis most poems come coupled with. 

I wonder without answers about this experimentation, though. What effect do these photographs and notes, innocently explaining the origin or inspirations behind the poems, have on the reception of the poem itself? Yes, they do add to the personal intensity of the poetry if we are told whose mother is being spoken about, for instance. But, do they rein the poetic sentiment in from flying to universal levels, by localizing it solidly in the poet’s heart and hearth? Then, could making a glossary of all allusions at the end of the book help the reader run amok in his own imagination and interpretation while reading; something some readers love to do? 

The strong after-taste of 'Writing by the Window' is one of a deeply felt memoir; ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ as Wordsworth called poetry. And Nivedita, we can sense, is firmly planted at the window in her house; looking without but mostly looking within room.

'Writing by the Window' by Nivedita N is a Parentheses Phroetry Press publication, 2015

[This review was commissioned by the author. Views are my own.]

Masters in my Room

With a loud ‘Oh God!’ I begin this post, as serious as it may be,

An invocation you may call it, or frustration, to put it simply.

I stood before my book shelf watching spines just newly born,

Thinking what my favourites think,  the ones now dead and gone.

From one genre to the next I went, (did I pronounce that right?),

To talk to the masters about book trends, and what was on their minds.

To see how books and writers have evolved into something new,

To see if we have grown new wings or bid them a quick adieu.

I noticed in a corner Chaucer stood with a knowing smile,

Could he have read the latest Humour best-seller on the vine?

He shook his head from side-to-side, confused me, then he said,

‘Winne whoso may, (my child) for al is for to selle.’

Amused I stood musing, when Dryden to Pope did say,

‘An immortal War with Wit’ wages the King of Satire today.

‘All Arguments, all arguments, but most his Plays perswade,

That for anointed dullness (nothing more), he was really made.’

Just then lovelorn Donne glided in, and a hand by his heart did lie,

Was this about the Love story readers swooned over, now swore by?

‘While I just managed to write an Elegie, to my Mistress Going to Bed,

Such love the writers must now know, to bring lovers back from the dead!’

The talk of Love disturbed his reverie, by the gurgling stream,

In walked Wordsworth, took a seat, ho-hummed to then proceed-

‘What Love you speak about, I just know not what you mean,

No trees, no sun, no Abbeys divine, of Nature books are clean.’

So many Thrillers abound today, who has space for a cherry tree?

Shakespeare looked as if he knew, adding mystery to the scene.

‘Oh mercy, droppeth from the Heavens now, and fall upon her head,

I saw that book’s end coming right after line 1, page 1 was read!’

Kundera’s political eyebrow shot-up in brave support,

Kafka in complete profundity said reading's ‘a trial’, no more.

Amitav Ghosh and Anathamurthy in a whisper together said,

Heads bent, shoulders down, a frown and then ‘Is literary nearly dead?’

While Lawrence winked and asked ‘So, they think they know all about sex?’

Premchand, Manto and Chugtai moaned their own legacy’s death.

Virginia Woolf woke-up from her dreams, only to think anew,

‘Why have writers closed all windows in what was once a room with a view?’

In flowing robes Homer sat till now - quiet, blind, unseen.

Till he roared ‘How epic! How epic! This glorious sea of mediocrity!’

Yeats wanted the gyres to turn, a ‘Second Coming’, a beast we need,

But Eliot, out of patience, shouted ‘Shantih Shantih Shantih’.

From me alone with my book shelf we had grown to quite a few,

Confirmed it was that Classic once may never again come true.

Alas! They vanished, one-by-one, those masters from my room,

‘Oh God!’ I sighed with loss once more, before I picked up the broom.

What you see below was a wise young owl, creative and with craft,

But in such pressing hurry to print, this smile he called his art.

What happened next is sad, so, so sad oh tragedy abound!

Just a wide-eyed face was left of what was once a wise young owl.

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - It builds character - Tell us about a favorite character from film, theater, or literature, with whom you’d like to have a heart-to-heart. What would you talk about?]

Book Review – Pendulum by Sarang Kawade

‘Life is driven by a single principle – decadence, resembling a still pendulum,’ says Sarang Kawade’s introduction to his book ‘Pendulum’, a collection of 48 stories rendered as poems or short prose passages. 

Decadence – that moral and cultural decline characterized by hedonism, debauchery, corruption, intemperance, immorality and wantonness, is the context this book arises out of. The mood, like the ‘pendulum called life’, oscillates between smiles and sorrows, hope and despair, loneliness and company. The setting is the young, urban world of IT jobs and coffee shops, cellphones and busy hours, empty homes and unrequited love as well as fruit vendors and homelessness, prejudice and even sexual assault. Each story has its own narrator, a voice speaking either like an observer or one deeply involved in documenting, scene-to-scene, his/her surroundings. Which, when you read you realize, are yours and mine too. 

As Sarang moves from one story to the next, the narrative voice changes in tenor from angry and even caustic at times, to plain objective; from despairingly dejected to hopeful and often preachy – all this depending on how involved or distant he feels to a specific story. For someone who likes deconstructing books based on changing narrative voice, this will be fodder for study.  

What remains consistent and helps bring the 48 stories together under ‘Pendulum’ is the author’s thought-process and the technique he uses to translate it into words.

The Thoughts and thought-out Technique

Sarang is 22 and in the software industry. That is all I know. When I asked him for an author introduction, he said he will give none. The artist wanted the art to be received independently, sans any pre-conceived notions that come with social labels. 

That he is only 22 amazed me at various points of time while reading the book, for he has already managed to unravel lessons from his life which typically (perhaps mythically) take years of grey hair to realise. There is ripeness of thought, a looking within and turning to self, an honest acknowledgement of social wrongs, a beautiful acceptance of the importance of relationships over jobs, of love over money, care over success. While the poems and stories remain bold and honest, each comes wrapped in a kind of maturity of thought which makes you believe what you read. The secret wishes of his various narrators (the ‘Burqa Clad Butterfly’ penultimate wish is to ‘ride a bike and let my loose hair fly’) – so simple yet so impossible to achieve, leaves you with a melancholic taste in your mouth.   

The language Sarang uses to deliver his ideas befits the narrators of his stories – young and urban, or old and alone, and lost. Expect no lovely lyricism or similes drawn from bounteous nature. This book was written in dark alleys of fat wallets ridden with futility and frustration, or empty ones clinging on to flashes of hope. So, Sarang speaks to us through the speakers of his stories in a language that those people speak in real life, not just to make himself understood but also to bring in a believability to the stories. In poems where he himself seems to be the speaker, the language becomes more complex than otherwise, but we realize how he too belongs in exactly the world that he is trying to hold a mirror up to in ‘Pendulum’. He speaks standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the different and differing narrators of the 48 stories. 

Apart from the prose passages written such that you wonder if they too are poems of some sort, personification of emotions, analogies with colonies of ants or bubbles, creative titles which read like exam questions with marks in parenthesis, advert jingles, letters from daughters to fathers, coupled with jumbled syntax like ‘Endure I long walks’ are everywhere. As is use of slang words, which, for the first time, I did not cringe on encountering.  

Let me give you my favourites out of this collection.

In a poem satirizing the kind of societies we have built around ourselves, Sarang creates ‘your reasoning town called ‘Brainville’ (somewhat reminiscent of Yeats’s idea of an anti-Christ being born in ‘The Second Coming’) where:

‘Neurons work as conformists in the

industry to recycle dumped ingenuity

and create a swarm of material desires.

But Hope is the secret vigilante, willing

to even die protecting the Rebel square.

(where)

Traditions are enshrined in Stereotype Avenue

(but where)

Hope is not scared.

Hope will soon be blessed with a child

Residents of Rebel Square have a name for the

Child – Belief.’

‘Love Conquers Gadgets Too’ connects existential alienation to the symbolic individualistic ‘I’s’ ‘being used by phone, laptop, tablet’, creating an (i)-me-myself world. An interestingly titled and creatively written ‘I care you. So take love’ begins with a question Care (personified) is asking about Love – ‘I feel jealous of her charm. Why is Love so popular and I am not?’  Care and Love write letters to each other to understand each other, to get married in the end. An idyllic situation but equally ironical when seen reflective of a society working on different principles. 

A brutal poem ‘Rapes, Cuts, Blood and Solace’ is a woman’s account of her many rapes, as nonchalantly as if she was talking about buying vegetables. At 16 – ‘I was raped yet again by a single guy. (Thank God)’ and the ( ) hurt. Raw anger in ‘Oh Thy Anger’ where ‘Be happy, act foolish, disguise fury, sounds so stupid your self-help shit’ speaks an angry voice yearning to break free from social givens. While passages like 'Game of Domestic Violence' stun you into silence, some others like 'Candy Floss Smile', and the final one in the book called ‘I love you father’ (I wonder if this lovely piece is autobiographical) come written straight from the heart, leaving you feeling warm. 

Most stories and poems have U-turns at the end, not a twist to shock or awe, but one to affirm a drop of hope where none seemed to exist a few lines before. Myriad moments of warmth exchanged and good deeds done delivered in such simple language, but never enough to make you forget the deprivation they are set in. 

An oscillating pendulum, but one which likes to remain steeped in sorrow! 

And then, the disappointments

1. While I have admired and enjoyed the thoughts behind the 48 stories and the oscillating sensitivity-brutality with which they have been expressed through the various narrators, not all poems or passages manage to maintain the power of expression consistently. ‘Stay Connected, Stay Insane’, ‘Ram Habib Daler Joseph’ and ‘I’m Sorry’ broke the effect either because the themes were repeated or they bordered on the typical. 

2. There is a self-contradiction in Sarang’s use of a ‘decadence’ (in a negative way) as the penultimate theme for his work. The very hedonism, intemperance and debauchery that characterizes decadence carries the idea of subversion too. Exactly the kind of subversion that Sarang actually celebrates/professes – artistic freedom, anti-establishment, quitting education, gay love, secularism, anti-rituals and prejudice, psychos with a heart, constructive anger. Decadence is not the word the author should have lamented about on the cover. Stagnation, materialism, alienation maybe. This being the only reason why I was wary of comparing some of his poems with Ginsberg’s ‘Beat Poetry’ like 'Howl' for instance – there is similar anger towards wrong, being sung to a rebellious beat, but not achieving the same level of clarity of purpose.

3. I would have liked a list of contents. Would have given some organization to the book. I am quite a Capricorn woman if you know what I mean!

‘Pendulum’ remains Sarang Kawade’s attempt to speak through men and women surviving different spheres and stages of life. The poetry is devoid of any ostentatious trappings and the short prose is simple and straight-forward, because he is letting his characters speak directly to you. Asking you to listen, understand and look around and within too. There is judgement in Sarang’s voice, against facets of society he doesn’t agree with and support for those suffering its idiosyncrasies. There is also a wish in Sarang’s heart, of personal freedom from all that binds artistic thought. This book, through its honesty and execution, succeeds in achieving this. 

I conclude with a few lines of a poem I have been re-reading ever since, ‘If I’m Weird, then who’s Normal?’ 

They call me weird, a social outlaw to be precise,

I take my stand; they’re the prisoners, the majority.

They say doubt wraps me, obscure is my speech,

I see clarity of thoughts erupting, bursting within me.

Their fundamental reaction is to concur, they usually comply,

I question back, I can’t walk around holding people’s beliefs.

They bully the fragile ones, beat them up to laud their insecurity,

I was beaten too but never defeated, they’re cowards, not me.

Title: Pendulum

Author: Sarang Kawade

Publisher: Partridge – A Penguin Random House Company

2014

[The review was commissioned by the author. The thoughts are my own.]

Book Review - Collection of Chaos by Tikuli

‘From chaos emerge new paths’, says Tikuli, as she introduces us to her poetry and her book, aptly named, ‘Collection of Chaos’. When you begin reading the verses contained within, you understand why this name. Not just because the author admits it was the ‘swirling chaos’ of her personal life that gave birth to this poetry, but also because each verse penned manages to bring forth the exact turbulence that it intended to. Such is Tikuli’s skilful style and thus rendered the emotions and moods behind each piece. 

The book ‘Collection of Chaos’ carries an unconventional structure. None of the poems have been titled and one page flows into the next, as if in seamless continuation even if the theme of the next poem is different from the one before it. Perhaps, this signifies chaos? Imagine, a battalion of verses coming at you without any method, without any reason to make you pause. Like a chaos of thoughts themselves, one after another. Similarly, the form of individual poems is unconventional too in keeping with the disturbance around. Single words as whole sentences, or even whole paragraphs. Six words as a poem or a sudden 60 traversing two pages. In this unpredictable structure lies one of the most important ways in which Tikuli paints Chaos in our minds. And to get the moods-behind-the-poems across. 

What are the poems about? About the dark underbelly of city life and the dreariness of the country’s. Poem after poem, Tikuli explores bitter truths of social existence. She shuttles between controlled rage and uncontrollable empathy to draw vivid but disturbing pictures of conflict and chaos – both within beings and around them too. The poetry is not pleasant, and neither is it kind. It was not born to delight but to shock you out of your comfort zone. Her recurrent imagery is of black crows, crushed flowers, shadows, solitude and silence. Tikuli writes about refugees and loneliness, martyrdom, mad women, farmer suicides and honour killing. She removes the veil off wifedom and even shows us the mind behind prostitution. There are labourer women and those being abused in plush settings. Old age and widowhood. Emotional infidelity, divorce and even rape. Yes, like I said, these poems are not kind. They are too real to care to be polite. Much like some of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry. Like his ‘Hunger’, for instance, which I read so many years back but which refuses to leave me for the stark reality it threw at me, and which this poetry reminded me of.

Some things I found particularly interesting, and you may too. The placement of Children, the over-arching feminist angle, the use of Nature and finally the play of Contrasts. 

It is interesting how Tikuli brings in children into her scenes. In a poem about ‘bone coloured sky’ and ‘parched earth, baked brown. Fields, dust bowls’, a scene of drought, perhaps, she says:

‘On a scorched tree –

A body hangs.

A child’s striken eyes,

Not really understanding,

keep a watch.

A vulture

awaits his chance.

In another place, 

‘A little boy stands alone

On the banks of Ganges,

his head shaven clean

Waiting for a crows touch,

for deliverance of his father’s soul’

In Tikuli’s poetry, children are neither the perpetrators nor the direct sufferers. They are mute spectators to violence and blood, rites and rituals and aspects of society they either don’t understand or know not how to respond to. Is the poet trying to remind us of our Tomorrows’ eyes watching the carnage, with the incipient fear that they may carry it into the future? 

The second idea is the predominance of the female presence. Tikuli’s poetry makes no attempt to veil her inclinations – that of creating verse upon verse to poetically document the Female Experience. Women – their wronged bodies and broken hearts, suffocating roles and helpless lives – are what keeps the poet’s pen occupied. So much so, the men automatically become conspicuous by their absence. Actually, they are not absent, but are present – as the perpetrators, the deceivers and the wrong-doers. The poems are sung by a female voice and aim only to give voice to women. Somewhat like Adrienne Rich?  

If we were to divide the book, roughly, into three parts, we see how the first and last part is only dark and chaotic whereas in the middle lies bright sunlight too. Tikuli gathers within her painting the world of animals too. You know, somewhat like the technique of Pathetic Fallacy, attributing human emotions to all things that make up nature too. These handful of verses right in the heart of the book stand in direct contrast to what the reader has witnessed till now. And all of them are deliciously imagined and penned. A banyan tree ‘standing tall … holds the cosmos in its canopy, a centre for life – insects, snakes, birds and humans’ and where ‘children play’. To nature we can turn for relief, seems to be the message in the riot of green introduced within all the grey, all too suddenly. Unlike the Romantics, who deified nature largely, Tikuli celebrates aspects of it which lie in our kitchen slabs or grow in our gardens. An organic whole of which humans and animals are part and parcel. Such verses are full of visual beauty and flowers, fruits, ‘marmalade skies’ and ‘sunburst margarita’ seem to signify fertility and growth, satiety, love and even happiness, actually. 

Love and Happiness? Not something one would imagine to find within the folds of this book, wrought with a lot of imagery from bad marriages, separation, infidelity and even sexual abuse. But Kris Saknussemm does prepare us for ‘a powerful sense of hope at work’ in her introduction to the book. Throughout the book, as you go from page to page, you see how for every 5 lines full of despair, in comes one pointing to hopefulness. Usually a fleeting sense of bright, but there. A woman is killed by a mob, like a witch hunt maybe. Tied to a tree she is stoned to death. And ‘her eyes closed forever, relieving her of the misery of being a woman’, and there is positive deliverance in death. A mad woman is always mocked near the village square, but ‘she rejoices in a life well spent,’ rising above the crowd, mocking their lives in turn. A labourer woman, mother, poor, but ‘in her vacant eyes an abstract dream of four walls and a roof,’ daring to dream. 

And this leads me to the play of contrasts in 'Collection of Chaos’. Tikuli admits the poetry was born out of chaos, thus metamorphosing chaos itself into something that can feed creativity, or give birth to poetry…

From the

Incessant dust

From the doors

Closed forever

Poems burst forth

Remember Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’? He said-

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”

Rich and poor, city and village, fertility and barrenness, chaos and creativity, and finally a breathtaking spiral downwards between words and silence near the end of the book are just some of the contrasts Tikuli works around. The poetry in this book arises from and breathes between them. Like:

Canvas of snow

A raven adds colour

Yin and yang

How ‘contraries’ are important to move ahead, to understand, to assimilate, perhaps to even realize the good parts of life, to celebrate. Why, I can almost imagine Yeats’s Theory of the Gyres – how in the death of a civilization lies the very seed for its birth too. And this to me remains the most beautiful aspect of this book.     

I see two problems with the compilation though. One, even as the title-less format adds to the effect of the mood the book is talking in, it can become confusing. Most poems begin and end on a single page. But some don’t. Which means, you may close the book not knowing the same poem continues on the next page. I wonder how many will find this format convenient to read the book over multiple sittings. Secondly, the idea of men being the perpetrators in multiple situations comes to me too strongly, and if I may say so, bordering on the prejudicial. The book voices the feminine, only, to the extent of silencing the other side of the story. I continue a little disturbed on this front. 

The poetry in ‘Collection of Chaos’ must be read. For those who enjoy structural unconventionality in poetry coupled with bold issues usually made invisible, this book offers a most mature poetry. For those who like it lyrical and light, the verses on nature will leave a permanent impression on your minds. And for some others who like to take it slow, to read a poem a day, know that each poem of this book is like a world in itself – offering you thoughts to think and maybe ideas to pen even. I got mine! 

The last verse of the book: 

Unlit words

Slumbering 

In the shadows

Of your silence

Luminous within

… points to an awakening. A sense of something to come. A fire smouldering to burst forth. Perhaps, another collection, Tikuli?

Titile: Collection of Chaos

Author: Tikuli

Publisher: Leaky Boot Press

2014

An Ode to 2 Odes, in Prose

This is not about Who I love. This is about What I love. 

And I tell you – I love words, the spoken ones too, but here I speak about the written words. How used how not. The pictures they create in my mind, and the chains of thought. The craft of putting one before the other, or something amiss with the whole structure, making me frown. Thinking, could this have been better? And then re-writing the sentence, anew. Leaning back to read those words strung together again. A smile on my face reflective of a satisfied mind, or the pencil scratching my head – this doesn’t look right! 

Words. The games they play, and the games we play with them.

And when you say ‘Ode’ on a day that stands for love, I think of 2 written long back. No, not by me, dear me! But by two poets who mastered their words – in ivory towers or sitting under trees. Even in the busiest of streets. Scribbled or typed, but always streams of thought, put in a language such that not a word I would dare change. Here’s them odes that I often go back to, and if you ask me why, I myself know not. Perhaps because these two odes rest unblemished by popularity. Also because while conventionally an Ode is supposed to be emotional and introspective, these here charm by being exactly the opposite.  

A few waltzing words, and the thoughts they conjure in my mind. Oh, I love! 

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat

Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes

Gray

Now, Gray was a mid-18th century poet, and unlike most others, he had inherited sufficient to not write for Grub Street. He read for amusement and wrote for the same reason too. No wonder then that humour ran in his veins and out his pen too. No wonder again that when he was asked to write an epitaph for his friend’s cat who drowned in a fish bowl, this is what he wrote. Here are a few lines (with many skipped in between): 

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,

The pensive Selima reclined,

Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;

She saw; and purred applause.

Two angel forms were seen to glide,

The genii of the stream:

She stretched in vain to reach the prize.

What female heart can gold despise?

Presumptuous maid!

Again she stretched, again she bent.

(Malignant Fate sat by and smiled.)

She tumbled headlong in.

She mewed to every watery God

No cruel Tom nor Susan heard.

A favourite has no friend.

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know one small step is ne’er retrieved,

And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

Not all that glisters gold.

Notice the controlled humour in this mock-epic - a composition using grand images to describe the most mundane. Also realize how the ode, an otherwise emotional piece, is actually devoid of any feelings for a dead animal. And this was supposed to be an epitaph! Look how it’s laden with moral and sexual undertones. If you can, keep aside the unflattering references to womenkind in the guise of the Narcissistic proud, gold (fish) greedy and over-reaching kitty, and see how the cat and woman blend. This masterfully written and endearing ode never fails to make me smile at my own kind. 'What female heart can gold despise?’ and yes he means to say a rich man no woman can ignore, today or back then in the London of yore. Keep those claws in, dear cats, and let us forgive him. Partly because it's a day for love, and partly because he's right! As for Fate? Are not we just playthings in the hands of our ‘Watery Gods’? Now that’s a thought to calm the mind! 

Ode to the Tomato

Neruda

You know Neruda – Neftali Ricardo Reyes, the much quoted Latin American poet. Of course you know! Now, his odes were known for their mastery of imagery and the skill of raising mundane objects to sublime heights. Simple language, simple technique, but deliciously cooked. Yes, this Ode is like a salad in the making. Single word lines make us read and read further as if we’re adding ingredients to the bowl. Step by step. While he is alluding to American culture behind all the red of the tomatoes, read this and tell me if it’s not enjoyable without that dimension too. Just pure pictures of culinary delight with an eye for detail and ahem, violence in the kitchen too. (Some lines skipped)

The street drowns in tomatoes:

summer

light

breaks

in two

tomato

halves,

and the streets

run with juice.

the tomato

cuts loose,

invades

kitchens,

takes over lunches,

too bad we most

assassinate;

a knife

plunges

into its living pulp,

red

viscera,

deep,

beds cheerfully

with the blonde onion

and to celebrate

oil

lets itself fall

over the gaping hemispheres,

we have the day’s

wedding:

parsley flaunts

its little flags.

its time!

lets go!

and upon the table

show off

their convolutions,

canals

and plenitudes

and the abundance

without husk,

or scale or thorn,

grant us

the festival

of ardent colour

and all-embracing freshness.

Our commonplace buy from the vegetable guy is celebrated in Latin America. It connotes beauty and fun and forms a meal for everybody. Yes, no elitism! A life without pretences and an ordinary that is celebration-worthy. So Neruda, including how he inscribes his geographical identity and nationality in an ode written for tomatoes! Did you feel the build-up of momentum? Like a painting being created. And the after-effect? A feeling of festivity and celebration. A poem I look at as romantic, because it makes us look at the most ordinary with such wonderment. Isn't it? 

A few waltzing words, and the thoughts they conjure in my mind. Oh, I love! 

Happy Valentine’s.

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts aimed at posting at least once a day, based on the prompts provided. The prompt for today was: Cupid’s Arrow - It’s Valentine’s Day, so write an ode to someone or something you love. Bonus points for poetry!]

How I Saw and Learnt

Here is my humble rhyme about some things that I have learnt,

From places, people and situations - the right ones and the wrong.

Life’s little instruction book is not just black or blue or green,

There is a moral to every story that unfolds for you to see.

I write this like a sing-along, hoping one day my son,

Will read my little ditty and say – ‘Oh mom, I saw and learnt!’

From a Place 

Home is where the heart resides, and where the soul must grow,

It’s a place where you are born, to know and know some more.

My granny welcomed Diwali with garlands she made herself,

She made us sit around her, taught us teamwork and togetherness. 

As her wrinkled shaking hands wove the marigolds on the thread,

I saw and learnt devotion – to faith, to family and to friends.

I had pouted when a certain shoe, white-sole and checkered-top,

My mother refused to buy me, even when all my friends had bought.

‘Be different, think different, my little one, if you want to stand out in the crowd,

Against the grain, away from the herd is where the Self is found.’

She was the 1st daughter-in-law with modern ideas and pants,

I saw and learnt that beyond norms too there teems a fertile land.

From People around 

You don’t learn like wine in a bottle, you learn from strangers around,

Turn your head 180 degrees, there are plenty of lessons to be found.

Some drive like devils some litter like fools, others pee on another’s wall,

I saw and learnt that these are things that don’t make sense, at all.

When you share a city, a country and a planet, you have to give what you take,

A little respect for another’s space, simply for goodness’s sake.

The bus was full, as I hung around with a man too close behind,

He brushed and dug his person into me, as others’ eyes turned blind.

I took it in for a little while, praying for it to stop,

Only when I slapped his face, did others push him out.

I saw and learnt that oftentimes, you are alone in a crowd,

You have to be the first one to stop what you know as wrong.

From a Situation 

You think you have learnt it all by now, when a mother you become,

But little ones can teach so much, if you look close and learn.

I saw and learnt to forget and forgive just like my little son,

A boy broke his toy, a few tears shed and next moment they played as one.

I see him shaking hands with glee with neighbours I don’t like,

I learn to look beyond difference and every minor fight.

But the most important right of all, that he has made me see,

Is that all parents need to grow along with their growing progeny.

I see him willing to learn and change, and enjoy an open mind,

I learn that that is where the solution to most adult problems lie.

As I see and learn I say, my Tomorrow I will teach,

But will not forget to ask him: “Will you too teach me, please?”

 [I am sharing what 'I Saw and I Learnt' at BlogAdda.com in association with DoRight.in] 

Dovetailed in Love

As good fortune had willed, our new school we joined together,

Only in different classes, for he is two years my elder.

He scored and played music to reach his height of glory,

I did this-and-that too, to write my own little story.

For reasons academic or for extra-curricular fame,

Each eventually got to know the other’s proper name.

And he became the head-boy, for that metal he was made of, 

And I, his one-year-junior, became his house prefect, that’s all.

Together we started working, for events and cultural meets,

Talking and coordinating, like really responsible beings.

But when I heard the whisper, that the head-boy “likes” me,

I would turn my head away, when his face I did see.

Blame me not, dear reader, for being so full of pride,

My mother taught in the same school, and I was a “staff child”.

So that big thing called male ego got a little stung,

And out came a volley of troubles for me, ‘The Insolent Junior One’.

Complaints of the irresponsible prefect started reaching the VP,

And at other times, just always so, I was given ‘toilet-duty’.

Some said the head-boy moved on, tied a red ribbon on another’s wrist,

While some kept promoting him to me, till I finally waved my fist.

No peace there was, oh dear, for I felt what’s called hot hell,

I dreamt of days when class 11 would bid class 12 farewell.

So when he passed out from school, I didn’t care a dime,

For what he gave me those days is what’s called a ‘bad time’.  

And then 6 years passed away, no clue no smile no frown,

When certain coincidences brought us both to our home town.

On an otherwise ordinary online day on my ordinary Orkut,

I suddenly see a friend request from, my good God guess who?

A re-union then got planned, for coffee and some cake,

Oh well, I’ll go so what, what difference does it make.

But difference it did make, as I saw something so new,

And that he saw in me some good I dearly hoped so too.

5 months, 5 cups of coffee, it took for us to realise,

That the person sharing the bill with me, should do it all my life.

Daddy, I have found for me what you call a Punjabi boy,

Well-settled, sane, intelligent, in love with me, Oh boy! 

So that is how pretty Lady Luck, turned her wheel my way,

A string of coincidences, Orkut, coffee and some cake.

School meetings, then adieu, and later more meetings too,

What was meant to be has happened, and I’m happy through and through.

Been 5 long years of marriage, and not a tear have I shed,

I think my mom was so right when she said - “He’s so well-bred!”

The toy in the picture above, is symbolic of us, you see,

It’s the first gift we bought for our yet-to-be-born baby. 

Now, on a request note I will end my “love-ly” take,

Kindly do not ask my husband for his side of the tale.

I cross my heart and promise that this is How We Met,

To end up man and wife, and as close as friends can get!

Lesson in Time

There is something that Time wants us to consider,

Not tomorrow, not later and not one-fine-day either.

To teach our children well but to consider the elders too,

For a short little lesson probably heeded by few.

A lesson that talks about Time, and all things that it makes,

Traditions and value systems, glorified myths and mistakes.

A lesson that reveals how fleeting our own Context is,

How today's 'Right' tomorrow no longer exists.

A lesson that explains that as Time goes ahead,

We need to shed systems that we needn't bear on our heads.

We need to reject ideas based on divisions,

Oppression and repression and a certain sex's submission.

We need to re-think codes - physical, moral and ethical,

Re-define black and white, and all grey in the middle. 

We need to embrace newness, the gift that Present brings,

We need to see with new eyes, the new minds and what they sing.

Then and only then, as Time moves towards its Change,

When we grow old, will we Evolve again.

We will understand the old but learn appreciation for the new,

When we educate not just tomorrow, but our yesterday too.