This is not a review. Sometimes poetry books don’t lend themselves to definitive judgements. Particularly anthologies, which cover so many different experiences and styles. If they’re really good, and this one is, they become more like an old friend. You don’t necessarily agree with everything they have to say, or how they say it, but when you meet, you feel a deep sense of engagement. Sometimes you can go for ages without reading them, but when you do, there’s no sense of discontinuity.
This anthology, which extracts from the familiar and the obscure, places side by side one of the world’s most energetic but disparate diasporas. For the first time in the UK, we have an anthology which juxtaposes Kamala Das with Vikram Seth, Kolaktar with Daljit Nagra. Styles are either modernist/ post-modernist or brilliantly traditional (e.g. Nagra’s almost Kiplingesque light verse in the mixed codes on Hindi English and Seth’s elegant narratives). Backgrounds range from Zoroastrian priest to marketing executive, sometimes that might even be the same person! One of the joys of this book is that each writer is introduced briefly by the editor so you get a sense of the remarkable communities which have informed the writing of the poets contained in this volume. Generally, speaking, there are Indian writers who increasingly seem to be part of the New Capitalism of graphic designers and public relations consultants. Then there are the American academics and the British poets, the latter engaged with the very particular struggle against racism and stereotyping, though please would someone explain why Moniza Alvi is missing, please (OK! OK! She’s of Pakistani origin but hey, let’s not be sectarian!).
I want to avoid the cliche about everything Indian being essentially various. But I would dare to venture there may be a sort of openness in the verse in this volume - whether it touches on sex or badminton or politics or love or history or philosophy - which is characteristic. When you read it, you are not left with a sense that the poets were playing safe when they were writing their verse, they do not edit out their passions or ideas, which is why the book is exciting, and why it is a friend and companion.
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Charles Tomlinson: New Collected Poems
Charles Tomlinson is one of the best poets to have written in English over the last 50 years, but his work rarely seems to attract the attention it deserves. A poet who often focuses on observation and description, interrogating the concept of viewpoint, he also writes poems about music, people and history and seems genuinely engaged with left-wing revolutionary politics, which captures his imagination, if not, entirely, his approval.
To mark the publication of his New Collected Poems, I thought I'd write about a poem I came across recently which expresses the tragic but heroic history of revolutionary failure in the 20th century. It's called - appropriately enough - 'Prometheus'. There are three elements in the poem: a Summer storm, the revolutionary piece of music by the Russian composer Scriabin which gives the poem its title and the poet's reflections on what took place in Russia after Prometheus was written.
These elements and the reasonably regular 6 line stanzas make the poem into an Ode. Think of Coleridge's Dejection - an Ode for a comparison.
There are a number 0f features in the poem (personification, periphrasis, juxtaposition) which challenge the reader. In some ways, it is fairly traditional poetry, but it is not accessible like Larkin:
Cymballed fireseeps. Prometheus came down
In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled
Before it..........
However, the great men have now departed and we live in a more pluralistic, kinder, less interesting time:
History treads out the music of your dreams
Through blood, and cannot close like this
................................................it stops. The trees
Continue raining though the rain has ceased
In a cooled world of incessant codas.
Reality is not like the romantic dreams of Scriabin or Lenin who wrote 'the daily prose such poetry prepares for'. Instead of an ending which provides some sort of culmination there is anti-climax and continuation, in the form of the English traditional tune, Greensleeves, played on the bell of an ice cream van:
...an ice cream van circulates the estate
Playing Greensleeves, and at the city's
Stale new frontier even ugliness
Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.
Not an easy poet to read then ... he doesn't adopt the saloon bar matiness of Larkin, yet in his seriousness and variety, he is in a sense more like a Victorian than the reactionary Larkin, who hated everything modern.
If the New Collected Poems seems to be too demanding a place to begin, try the Poetry Archive site and listen to Tomlinson reading from his work, including the beautiful, moving and restrained poem, entitled, 'The Door'.
To mark the publication of his New Collected Poems, I thought I'd write about a poem I came across recently which expresses the tragic but heroic history of revolutionary failure in the 20th century. It's called - appropriately enough - 'Prometheus'. There are three elements in the poem: a Summer storm, the revolutionary piece of music by the Russian composer Scriabin which gives the poem its title and the poet's reflections on what took place in Russia after Prometheus was written.
These elements and the reasonably regular 6 line stanzas make the poem into an Ode. Think of Coleridge's Dejection - an Ode for a comparison.
There are a number 0f features in the poem (personification, periphrasis, juxtaposition) which challenge the reader. In some ways, it is fairly traditional poetry, but it is not accessible like Larkin:
Cymballed fireseeps. Prometheus came down
In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled
Before it..........
However, the great men have now departed and we live in a more pluralistic, kinder, less interesting time:
History treads out the music of your dreams
Through blood, and cannot close like this
................................................it stops. The trees
Continue raining though the rain has ceased
In a cooled world of incessant codas.
Reality is not like the romantic dreams of Scriabin or Lenin who wrote 'the daily prose such poetry prepares for'. Instead of an ending which provides some sort of culmination there is anti-climax and continuation, in the form of the English traditional tune, Greensleeves, played on the bell of an ice cream van:
...an ice cream van circulates the estate
Playing Greensleeves, and at the city's
Stale new frontier even ugliness
Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.
Not an easy poet to read then ... he doesn't adopt the saloon bar matiness of Larkin, yet in his seriousness and variety, he is in a sense more like a Victorian than the reactionary Larkin, who hated everything modern.
If the New Collected Poems seems to be too demanding a place to begin, try the Poetry Archive site and listen to Tomlinson reading from his work, including the beautiful, moving and restrained poem, entitled, 'The Door'.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
It's a Bomber! Zeppelins by Chris McCabe
There is a view that modern poetry is written by a small, self-reviewing clique, which is highly critical of outsiders but praises mediocre work highly if it is written in an approved style by 'one of us'. Personally, I think that this view is too simplistic. There is a lot of very good contemporary poetry which should be more widely read. However, there is a grain of truth in it too.
Take, for instance, Chris McCabe's second collection, Zeppelins (Salt hardback, £12.99). This was praised by Poetry London, which I think was a pity because a talented and original poet - who works in London for the Poetry Library - has taken a wrong turning and needs some critcism to get his work back on the right track.
McCabe's first collection, The Hutton Inquiry, is a must-buy book which is likely to be seen as a signature collection for the age which is just (sadly imho) passing: New Labour's attempt to reconstruct Britain around a progressive consensus. This fell apart partly as a result of the foolish decision to join in with Bush's invasion of Iraq but also because it was based on an uncritical acceptance of modern neo-liberal capitalism. McCabe picked up on this at just the right time - when the 'chattering classes' were beginning to turn on Blair and Blairism.
Clearly influenced by the New York school of poetry (and maybe poets like Charles Olson?), McCabe's style was both immediate and highly intellectual. Here were ringing phrases reflecting an well-educated and eclectic mind in action (and reaction) to the events around him (or to his own random associations). For instance, in the poem #255:darwin, the subject rolls forward accruing ideas which are vividly and directly expressed:
greatest mystery
story ever
inquisitorial simulacrum
copies of copies
without a template
even and squatting
twelve inches in front
a train speeds
...........
epiphanies of gulls
grandchildren
sliding down
history's banister
Whilst there are still poems written with a similar wit and energy in his second collection, there are also some idle stinkers, the worst of which is his poem about getting married, The Nuptials, which includes a cute little doodle and lines like these:
I write each night
as you take your bath
the poured rioja
connects us together -
"We're having a great holiday
aren't we?"
Strangely (or should I say, entirely predictably) his wife never actually materialises as a person in the poem at all although she does get compared to a Greek goddess (yawn):
like Aphrodite was back
against the tide of fashion
This is jigsaw poetry with bits missing. The pieces supplied by the poet are supposedly witty and vivid and we, the readers, are supposed to be spurred into completing the scenes in our head. Unfortunately, I find that increasingly the poet's pieces are pedestrian or pretentious, or both:
life is good
but the rules
don't work,
make up
your own
and never live
by them
(Poems Overhead)
The best piece of advice to give McCabe is to keep on writing but stop publishing so much. He may have to find a mature style and perhaps a little self-doubt might ultimately assist him in doing so. Perhaps the powerful title poem shows the way ahead and I like to energy and confessional reflectiveness in Dovecot, Liverpool, one of a number of sonnets with some very good features.
Take, for instance, Chris McCabe's second collection, Zeppelins (Salt hardback, £12.99). This was praised by Poetry London, which I think was a pity because a talented and original poet - who works in London for the Poetry Library - has taken a wrong turning and needs some critcism to get his work back on the right track.
McCabe's first collection, The Hutton Inquiry, is a must-buy book which is likely to be seen as a signature collection for the age which is just (sadly imho) passing: New Labour's attempt to reconstruct Britain around a progressive consensus. This fell apart partly as a result of the foolish decision to join in with Bush's invasion of Iraq but also because it was based on an uncritical acceptance of modern neo-liberal capitalism. McCabe picked up on this at just the right time - when the 'chattering classes' were beginning to turn on Blair and Blairism.
Clearly influenced by the New York school of poetry (and maybe poets like Charles Olson?), McCabe's style was both immediate and highly intellectual. Here were ringing phrases reflecting an well-educated and eclectic mind in action (and reaction) to the events around him (or to his own random associations). For instance, in the poem #255:darwin, the subject rolls forward accruing ideas which are vividly and directly expressed:
greatest mystery
story ever
inquisitorial simulacrum
copies of copies
without a template
even and squatting
twelve inches in front
a train speeds
...........
epiphanies of gulls
grandchildren
sliding down
history's banister
Whilst there are still poems written with a similar wit and energy in his second collection, there are also some idle stinkers, the worst of which is his poem about getting married, The Nuptials, which includes a cute little doodle and lines like these:
I write each night
as you take your bath
the poured rioja
connects us together -
"We're having a great holiday
aren't we?"
Strangely (or should I say, entirely predictably) his wife never actually materialises as a person in the poem at all although she does get compared to a Greek goddess (yawn):
like Aphrodite was back
against the tide of fashion
This is jigsaw poetry with bits missing. The pieces supplied by the poet are supposedly witty and vivid and we, the readers, are supposed to be spurred into completing the scenes in our head. Unfortunately, I find that increasingly the poet's pieces are pedestrian or pretentious, or both:
life is good
but the rules
don't work,
make up
your own
and never live
by them
(Poems Overhead)
The best piece of advice to give McCabe is to keep on writing but stop publishing so much. He may have to find a mature style and perhaps a little self-doubt might ultimately assist him in doing so. Perhaps the powerful title poem shows the way ahead and I like to energy and confessional reflectiveness in Dovecot, Liverpool, one of a number of sonnets with some very good features.
Friday, 31 July 2009
Briggflatts by Basil Bunting: a new edition by Bloodaxe with DVD and CD
If you don't have this magnificent book, buy it. For £12, you get Basil Bunting's masterpiece, Briggflatts, a collection of short readable pieces about Bunting's colourful life and the poem, a DVD of a film made for Channel 4 in 1982 about Bunting (which simply wouldn't be made by that channel these days, proof positive of dumbing down big style) and a CD of the poet reading the poem in his gruff Northumberland accent (the 'r's are rolled at the top of the throat).
Annoyed by critical speculation about the 'meaning' of the poem, Bunting composed an entertaining note to set the record straight. Like the poetry, it is simultaneously authoritative and slyly elusive. he explains the scheme of the poem and then asserts: All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound
Given Bunting's irritation at the thought of critical dissection, I hesitate to put forward my thoughts about the poem except as a brief record of my experience of reading it to date, assisted by the film and Bunting's own reading.
For me, the poem reflects a sense of mortal transience set against the flinty longevity of Northumbrian English, the often harsh but sometimes lovely landscape of the far North of England and the power and wildness of the sea. It also encapsulates criticial moments from Bunting's own life in Northumberland, London, Italy and the Middle East. You will also find nuggets of history there, most memorably, the story of Eric Bloodaxe. Underlying this rich compost is a 50 year old love affair which the narrator in the poem (presumbaly Bunting) failed to pursue. It is therefore also a poem of regret and acceptance.
Somehow the poet manages to recreate in modern English, the sense of Old English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Norse) verse. Some of it is reminscent of the poem, so wonderfully translated by Bunting's friend, Ezra Pound, The Seafarer and of course Anglo-Saxon verse in particular was concerned with crisis, transience, loss and failure. But it's the sound of the lines which revive the dynamics of Old English verse, like these:
Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
However, the fluidity of the subject matter gives the poem a Modernist (and Post Modernist)feel.
Annoyed by critical speculation about the 'meaning' of the poem, Bunting composed an entertaining note to set the record straight. Like the poetry, it is simultaneously authoritative and slyly elusive. he explains the scheme of the poem and then asserts: All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound
Given Bunting's irritation at the thought of critical dissection, I hesitate to put forward my thoughts about the poem except as a brief record of my experience of reading it to date, assisted by the film and Bunting's own reading.
For me, the poem reflects a sense of mortal transience set against the flinty longevity of Northumbrian English, the often harsh but sometimes lovely landscape of the far North of England and the power and wildness of the sea. It also encapsulates criticial moments from Bunting's own life in Northumberland, London, Italy and the Middle East. You will also find nuggets of history there, most memorably, the story of Eric Bloodaxe. Underlying this rich compost is a 50 year old love affair which the narrator in the poem (presumbaly Bunting) failed to pursue. It is therefore also a poem of regret and acceptance.
Somehow the poet manages to recreate in modern English, the sense of Old English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Norse) verse. Some of it is reminscent of the poem, so wonderfully translated by Bunting's friend, Ezra Pound, The Seafarer and of course Anglo-Saxon verse in particular was concerned with crisis, transience, loss and failure. But it's the sound of the lines which revive the dynamics of Old English verse, like these:
Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
However, the fluidity of the subject matter gives the poem a Modernist (and Post Modernist)feel.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Collected Poems by Michael Donaghy with an introduction by Sean O'Brien (O'Wow) published by Picador
This substantial but portable hardback is a bargain at £12.99. The first thing that you may notice about it (assuming that you don't have a visual impairment) is the dust cover, from which the author peers, with an intense, if slightly psychotic stare, enhanced by the fact that the top of his head and chin have been cropped off the image.
Given Eva Saltzman's revelations in the lastest edition of Poetry London about the author's love of raves, garage and house music, I can't help feeling that the possessed stare might have some sort of chemical basis. If his regrettably early death in 2005 from cancer was hastened by drugs, then that adds to a long list of people whose lives were irreparably damaged by the desperate hedonism and DIY communitarianism of the 90's rave scene.
The intensity of the cover is mirrored by the contents of the book, which has a useful introduction by Sean O'Brien, which manages to be, by turns, authoritative, tub thumping, subtle, perceptive and opaque ( a polite civil service term for 'being up your own arse', as we say in Yorkshire). This is followed by Donaghy's 4 published collections and some uncollected poems right at the end. Unfortunately, there is no first line index or index of titles.
O'Brien points out that the best poems are influenced by John Donne or Browning (or Eliot in Portrait of a Lady). The poetry is unusual in having both intellectual scope and a tendency to rhyme. I think O'Brien is wrong to say that it completely avoids the dull autobiography of so much modern verse. From time to time Donaghy dabbles around in his Irish-American identity so he can write poems about his Mum.
He often writes about failed seductions or tries the odd seduction poem out and does a pretty good job of it. Not an easy task for someone to complete successfully in the late 20th century, but he has a much more limited emotional range than Donne - or even Robert Graves for that matter, whose love poems are just as clever whilst demonstrating a little more maturity. Sadly, maturity was beginning to display itself in his last collection, Safest, which he wrote when he knew he was gravely sick and dying, though not a maturity which destroys his playfulness and zest:
Don't worry. I gave the dancing monkey your suicide note.
Was it something important? How was I to know?
He's probably torn it to pieces now or eaten it
or substituted every word for one adacent in the dictionary
(Hazards)
What I love his poetry for is its polish, its fertile imagistic invention and his ability to start with a great first line, or from an odd perspective. Apparently, he had some difficulties getting poetry magazine editors to publish his work - possibly because he never mastered the Zen art of taking everything you might be interested to read in a poem out of it. However, neither is he didactic nor does he use his poems as a vehicle to dump trite thoughts or emotions on the reader.
Enough of my interpretation ... if you want comment, buy the book and read O'Brien's chewy (but largely digestible) introduction. Then get stuck into the poems, which form one of the best dessert selections you're ever likely to come across. Here's some great lines to whet your appetite:
We shared a dream beneath
a dream-beneath-a-dream.
Our tears became a storm
that washed away our names
and our voices blended with the rain's.
(5:00/5:10/5:15)
I touch the cold flesh of a God in the V and A,
the guard asleep in his chair, and I'm shocked
to find it's plaster. These are the reproduction rooms,
where the David stands side by side with the Moses
and Trajan's column (in two halves).
It reminds me of the inventory sequence in Citizen Kane.
It reminds me of an evening twenty years ago.
(Erratum)
Me, I heard a throaty click at the end of 'wedlock'.
And Niagara on the long distance line.
(Cage)
And if you're still not convinced, try The Raindial on page 108 or Music and Sex and Drinking on page 14, for the re-introduction of the Renaissance 'conceit' into English(ish) poetry
Given Eva Saltzman's revelations in the lastest edition of Poetry London about the author's love of raves, garage and house music, I can't help feeling that the possessed stare might have some sort of chemical basis. If his regrettably early death in 2005 from cancer was hastened by drugs, then that adds to a long list of people whose lives were irreparably damaged by the desperate hedonism and DIY communitarianism of the 90's rave scene.
The intensity of the cover is mirrored by the contents of the book, which has a useful introduction by Sean O'Brien, which manages to be, by turns, authoritative, tub thumping, subtle, perceptive and opaque ( a polite civil service term for 'being up your own arse', as we say in Yorkshire). This is followed by Donaghy's 4 published collections and some uncollected poems right at the end. Unfortunately, there is no first line index or index of titles.
O'Brien points out that the best poems are influenced by John Donne or Browning (or Eliot in Portrait of a Lady). The poetry is unusual in having both intellectual scope and a tendency to rhyme. I think O'Brien is wrong to say that it completely avoids the dull autobiography of so much modern verse. From time to time Donaghy dabbles around in his Irish-American identity so he can write poems about his Mum.
He often writes about failed seductions or tries the odd seduction poem out and does a pretty good job of it. Not an easy task for someone to complete successfully in the late 20th century, but he has a much more limited emotional range than Donne - or even Robert Graves for that matter, whose love poems are just as clever whilst demonstrating a little more maturity. Sadly, maturity was beginning to display itself in his last collection, Safest, which he wrote when he knew he was gravely sick and dying, though not a maturity which destroys his playfulness and zest:
Don't worry. I gave the dancing monkey your suicide note.
Was it something important? How was I to know?
He's probably torn it to pieces now or eaten it
or substituted every word for one adacent in the dictionary
(Hazards)
What I love his poetry for is its polish, its fertile imagistic invention and his ability to start with a great first line, or from an odd perspective. Apparently, he had some difficulties getting poetry magazine editors to publish his work - possibly because he never mastered the Zen art of taking everything you might be interested to read in a poem out of it. However, neither is he didactic nor does he use his poems as a vehicle to dump trite thoughts or emotions on the reader.
Enough of my interpretation ... if you want comment, buy the book and read O'Brien's chewy (but largely digestible) introduction. Then get stuck into the poems, which form one of the best dessert selections you're ever likely to come across. Here's some great lines to whet your appetite:
We shared a dream beneath
a dream-beneath-a-dream.
Our tears became a storm
that washed away our names
and our voices blended with the rain's.
(5:00/5:10/5:15)
I touch the cold flesh of a God in the V and A,
the guard asleep in his chair, and I'm shocked
to find it's plaster. These are the reproduction rooms,
where the David stands side by side with the Moses
and Trajan's column (in two halves).
It reminds me of the inventory sequence in Citizen Kane.
It reminds me of an evening twenty years ago.
(Erratum)
Me, I heard a throaty click at the end of 'wedlock'.
And Niagara on the long distance line.
(Cage)
And if you're still not convinced, try The Raindial on page 108 or Music and Sex and Drinking on page 14, for the re-introduction of the Renaissance 'conceit' into English(ish) poetry
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
The Mystery revealed
You may wonder why there is a photo of Soviet public art at the top of this blog (in fact, it's the monument to the dead who fell in 'The Great Patriotic War' which can be found in Riga, Latvia).
The following link to a poem of mine published in nthposition may help to explain why:
http://www.nthposition.com/theforgottenwhereabouts.php
Unfortunately, I haven't had time this month to write a review but hope to next month. So you'll have to suffer one of mine!
The following link to a poem of mine published in nthposition may help to explain why:
http://www.nthposition.com/theforgottenwhereabouts.php
Unfortunately, I haven't had time this month to write a review but hope to next month. So you'll have to suffer one of mine!
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Indian Poetry in English: Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar
I bought this volume in the Bloomsbury branch of Waterstones. The edition I got was published by the New York Review of Books and, I'm sorry to say, was in a cut-price sale. Talk about bargains, though! Originally written in English, Jejuri is a masterpiece of contemporary Indian poetry and my edition also contains an illuminating, engaging and erudite biographical and critical account of Kolatkar's work, written by Amit Chaudhuri, a distinguished author from a younger generation, who has already won the Commonwealth Writer's prize.
The work is post-modern in its irony and detachment, but don't let that put you off: Kolatkar is vivid, immediate and funny. Whilst not didactic, there is plenty of sly comment on religion and priests in particular (one is described as having 'a lazy lizard stare').
Chaudhuri's introduction says more about the poet and his book, better than I could ever hope to, but I do have some small observations for you, if you will do me the favour of reading them.
The first point to make is that the collection is really a sequence of poems which present some snapshots of one person's pilgrimage (or visit, since the narrator does not appear to be overwhelmed by conviction) to a religious shrine. Generally, the kind of poetry Kolatkar writes can be observational, almost off-hand at times:
That's no doorstep.
It's a pillar on its side.
Yes.
That's what it is.
(The Doorstep).
Often there is a narrative element:
The door was open.
Manohar thought
it was one more temple.
(Manohar)
At other times, the poems can be like little allegories (think Ted Hughes in Remains of Elmet, but with a sense of humour):
sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya
he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods
(Chaitanya - there are a number of poems with this title in the book, perhaps the collection is organised around musical principles like Eliot's work)
Kolatkar uses a number of rhetorical devices, which give his short lines intensity and focus - qualities which he usually manages to display at the same time as being humorous. These seem to involve mixing up abstract and concrete elements:
a herd of legends
on a hill slope
(Chatanya - a different version from the one quoted above)
Kolatkar's comments on religion are sly and cheeky but he seems to show how religious thinking has permeated and shaped every aspect of Indian life. Thus, at the end, when he describes the somewhat haphazard railway station from where the narrator intends to make his return journey, he states that:
the booking clerk believes in the doctrine
of the next train
(The Railway Station)
Linking in with the appearance and reality theme of The Doorstep, he seems to be saying that the imagination transforms this rocky tumbledown place into the stuff of dreams and legend. Scratch a rock, he says, and a legend springs.
Ultimately, the poem is affirmative and the last image, if I'm not mistaken, is taken from the Indian flag:
the setting sun
touches upon the horizon
at a point where the rails
like the parallels
of a prophecy
appear to meet
the setting sun
large as a wheel
(The Railway Station)
This may contain an element of irony but it is allied to affection and a deep sense of loyalty. I enjoyed this book very much indeed and note that Bloodaxe have just published an anthology of contemporary Indian poets who write in English. Thanks to Jejuri, I shall certainly be getting it.
The work is post-modern in its irony and detachment, but don't let that put you off: Kolatkar is vivid, immediate and funny. Whilst not didactic, there is plenty of sly comment on religion and priests in particular (one is described as having 'a lazy lizard stare').
Chaudhuri's introduction says more about the poet and his book, better than I could ever hope to, but I do have some small observations for you, if you will do me the favour of reading them.
The first point to make is that the collection is really a sequence of poems which present some snapshots of one person's pilgrimage (or visit, since the narrator does not appear to be overwhelmed by conviction) to a religious shrine. Generally, the kind of poetry Kolatkar writes can be observational, almost off-hand at times:
That's no doorstep.
It's a pillar on its side.
Yes.
That's what it is.
(The Doorstep).
Often there is a narrative element:
The door was open.
Manohar thought
it was one more temple.
(Manohar)
At other times, the poems can be like little allegories (think Ted Hughes in Remains of Elmet, but with a sense of humour):
sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya
he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods
(Chaitanya - there are a number of poems with this title in the book, perhaps the collection is organised around musical principles like Eliot's work)
Kolatkar uses a number of rhetorical devices, which give his short lines intensity and focus - qualities which he usually manages to display at the same time as being humorous. These seem to involve mixing up abstract and concrete elements:
a herd of legends
on a hill slope
(Chatanya - a different version from the one quoted above)
Kolatkar's comments on religion are sly and cheeky but he seems to show how religious thinking has permeated and shaped every aspect of Indian life. Thus, at the end, when he describes the somewhat haphazard railway station from where the narrator intends to make his return journey, he states that:
the booking clerk believes in the doctrine
of the next train
(The Railway Station)
Linking in with the appearance and reality theme of The Doorstep, he seems to be saying that the imagination transforms this rocky tumbledown place into the stuff of dreams and legend. Scratch a rock, he says, and a legend springs.
Ultimately, the poem is affirmative and the last image, if I'm not mistaken, is taken from the Indian flag:
the setting sun
touches upon the horizon
at a point where the rails
like the parallels
of a prophecy
appear to meet
the setting sun
large as a wheel
(The Railway Station)
This may contain an element of irony but it is allied to affection and a deep sense of loyalty. I enjoyed this book very much indeed and note that Bloodaxe have just published an anthology of contemporary Indian poets who write in English. Thanks to Jejuri, I shall certainly be getting it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
