Strange Love

I am running away from my sun

Burrowing deep into the coolness of my soul

An earthworm in search of moisture and solace

From the arid demands of strange love

Seeking me out, kills me with his starry heat.

29-1-11

Hippocrene: Chaotic Thoughts

Hippocrene: Chaotic Thoughts

Voice of Third AD

New Voices: Poets and Poetics of Five New Millennium Poets from Kerala

Edited by

JT Jayasingh

Thiruvanathapuram: Roots and Wings, 2009.

Rs 150/-

pp I01

Poetry dwells in the heart of man. It is a truism proved by our historical annals of literature.  Even today poetry is one of the favourite forms of utterances paradoxically its read and enjoyed only by a limited community. In this context, here is a group of poets, calling themselves the new millennium poets taking up the challenge of promoting poetry among contemporary readers. As pointed out in the preface of the book, they believe that ‘…readers and poetry lovers deserve to read together the poets who live in their own age …’ and gather an overview of their philosophies and motives behind their poetic out pour.

The anthology titled New Voices opens with Dr.Syamala’s poems which like a tapestry weaves her quest of spirituality with her concerns of postmodern dislocations and tries to redefine a world that is perfumed with nostalgia and love in an idiom and diction incomparable. If the poem Krishna is a scorching attempt to accommodate Lord Krishna in the postmodern milieu Amravati laments the loss and deterioration of simple and ideal village life and its spiritual ambience. The poems like Mervin d’Costa, Old Woman etc are almost Wordsworthian in its conception and treatment. Layers of nostalgia streams through poems like Exiles Revisited and Rice.

Annie George stands out as a meditative poet concerned with the minutiae of day to day life and her concerns for the people around her. To her poetry is a ‘silent art’. She claims writing poetry is therapeutic to her and she writes when she is inspired. Her tender concern for her daughter’s friend, For Aparna, her sarcastic reflections in Open House, her realistic description of women life in Between Sisters makes her an endearing poet.

Noushad’s poems almost modernist in its powerful suggestiveness reflect the poets’ preoccupation with the meaning of life. Love and Love the only long poem in this selection catalogues and celebrates love which reminds one of Whitman and his Song of Myself. His shorter poems are splashed with colour and light bringing him closer to the impressionists who tried to capture the play of light on nature on their canvasses. Couched in simple diction his poems are oblique like a Picasso painting making one wonder at their meaning, when it dawns like a flash of lightening delighting the reader, as evident in his Grazing. If vakrokti or obliqueness is the soul of poetry in Indian Aesthetics then Noushad’s poetry is replete with it making him a master craftsman.

Personal and confessional, most of Sandhya’s poems have captured the postmodern women’s inner conflicts and emotions. Intensely romantic her poems Touch me not…, Romance, How can I Trust…powerfully brings out the dilemma of a feminine mind, wrought in simple diction. Break the Silence stands as a class apart. A powerful exhortation to women it can be compared to The Song to the Men of England by Shelley. Struggle of womanhood, loneliness, sacrifice are some of the themes that loom large in her poems making her a poet closer to the contemporary women.

The poet editor JT Jayasingh’s poems reverberate with all the angst of a postmodern sensitive mind torn between the harsh realities and the romantic idealistic concept of life. The poems marked by lucidity of expression and simplicity haunt the readers even after the book is closed. The beauty of the  poems like Deer, and Another May Day lie in their subtle evocation of violence perpetrated on nature and woman. The concise piece The Strange World nostalgically sums up the changes in the world akin to the world which met Irving’s, Rip van winkle after his twenty years of slumber. In just nine lines the silence or what is left unsaid evocates the whole trauma of change for the unprepared. Anxiety about class differences, marginalization, gender differences etc are subtly and skillfully woven into the texture of The Train I Travelled, Her Marble Legs etc that they are hardly visible. In some of the poems there is an underlying sweeping nostalgia for the past and a relentless desire to trap them and make them last for ever as John Keats has done in his master piece The Grecian Urn. In They Are Extinct  he  addresses his son

MY son hark a secret

...Scribbling is with me,

My son will you keep this

Until it sparks another poet.’

In yet another poem  to his son There was a Time  he sings

‘I tell you I tell you my son,

 There was a time

We really lived our life’

                                    Going through these poems one feels that Jayasingh has proved himself to be a people’s poet and that he does not live in an ivory tower in spite of his profound romanticism and deep-rooted  nostalgia. In his treatment of subject matter especially poems related to nature and woman he is profoundly empathetic and eco-feministic. By blending fact and fancy he leaves the reader ruminating over his words.

This anthology intended for the contemporary readers can be summed up in Dryden’s words ‘Here is God’s plenty’. There is food for everyone. And no reader will be disappointed. It is a repertoire of nostalgia, spirituality, romance, love, reality, nature, eco-feminism and protest of five new generation poets from different parts of Kerala. It is also a brilliant attempt at redefining and establishing a tradition of poetry that is uniquely Indian. There is no pretence in the usage of language or style or technique. They sing what comes straight from their heart as stated in their poetic manifesto.

Chaotic Thoughts

Shattered pieces of crystals

Each a world unto itself

Reflecting the reality

In dimensions distorted

To a mind in frenzy

Driven by chaotic

Gales of thoughts.

 Take away this cup of wine

Bitter sweet in its intensity

So I may survive yet another day

In joy, oblivious to the storm

Raging in my heart.

10-1-11

Hilly Land and Her New Home

The new land though hilly and mountainous, had its own charms. Lying on the outskirts of the town it was literally a hill which her father had purchased at a throw a way price. A farmer, with green fingers he started terrace cultivation. It was an innovation which was much appreciated. And he tapped the best of harvest from it. He loved trees. He bought sapplings from fruit tree farms and planted them. Mango Trees were his favourites. Even though she missed her childhood home here was a new kind of terrain rather a wild one. It was the little streams and the high mountains that fascinated her. They lived "far away from the madding crowd". They had no neighbours, wherever she looked there was only green undulating land. She felt like Cowper's solitary sailor, the the monarch of all she surveyed .This love for land and trees remained with her long after she left her home.

Painting by Latha Prem Sakhya

Home - A Place Where You Really Belong

Trees

Trees were next to her heart if one checks out her passion for water sources. The trees on her land were a source of wonder for her. There were four gigantic Tamarind trees like sentries watching over their land. Her favourite one was the second tree nearest to her home. She was always there, building houses for her dolls .Often her sisters and other akkas (Elder sisters) in the neighbourhood joined her. They would play, inventing game after game all,  products of sheer imagination. Their all time favourite was keeping a drunkard’s house. The girl became invariably the drunkard. Because she had watched from a distance what occurred in her friend Rani’s house when her father came home drunk Oh there was, much fun and laughter. Then there were those huge Ayyanni trees and the jack fruit trees.. The girl really loved them .In great ecstasy she would hug them to her heart. As she grew the trees became a kind of solace for her. Often she shared her teenage woes with them. In their silence or in their rustling she heard words of comfort. They were also her favourite haunt where she read her favourite books or where she studied. She even slept under their shade. This love grew but when they shifted to the new farm her father purchased,  her heart was broken. She missed her friend the boy in blue shirt and Khaki Knickers, the crystal clear pond and her huge trees.


Down Memory lane


Going down memory lane,
I came to my old homestead-
Where, for seventeen summers
I was nurtured.

The old rambling house, with its spacious rooms;
The sweeping land; the gigantic tamarind trees-
Four great pillars- sentry like
Guarding the terrain.

The second one, nearest to my homestead -
Our favourite haunt! My siblings
And I, with childish enthusiasm, played
Making doll houses and keeping house.

Oh, it was such fun then!
No care, no worries,
Only, innocent mirth and grief.
But alas gliding years,
Weaves a nostalgic dream
Unwinding the spool of yearning,
To regain the golden days of childhood.

From  Memory Rain