A collection of poems drawn from Shanta Acharya’s five books of poetry and placed alongside some of her new work, Imagine is testimony to a poetic voice that has retained its quiet strength and steady purpose over the years. No mean achievement, this. As one samples these poems, one is acutely aware that they constitute a life-archive. A life-archive imbued with lyricism that begins at the very beginning, with curiosity and wonder:
“ There are things/ you need not know/ my mother once said/ when I pricked my balloon/ to discover what hid inside. ”
And indeed, this sense of constant discovery is the thread that runs through much of Shanta’s work. What the poet arrives at is often the landscape of her own sadness, losses endured, lessons learnt. Each poem is like a tiny sutra , a meditative frame through which the poet views the world.
The parting
In ‘Day of Reckoning’, Shanta speaks of a rendezvous she could not prepare for, of the stripping away of things she had valued “ by sudden manoeuvres ”, of being “ cursed with futile labour ”. It is the same terrible, relentless sadness, the sense that everything about life is precarious, that touches everything she sees. In “ the narrow lanes of Cuttack ”, a wayside urchin is “ short-changed, his Aishwarya slips/ through cracked sheets of posters ”. There is, it would seem, no possibility of escape. Some poems are rich in throw-away, razor-sharp commentary, as in the one titled ‘Arranged Marriage’ which concludes: “ Love will rise like a phoenix, they said,/ friendship will follow with the children of god./ But first, one has to be turned inside out. ”
Anchored in art, music and dance, several of Shanta’s new poems create a series of engaging visuals. ‘L’Atelier Rouge’ after a painting by Matisse titled ‘The Red Studio’, is particularly evocative. The speaker waits, thinking the artist “ will walk in any moment,/ start sharing stories of paintings on paintings. ” This section also features the poem ‘Nirbhaya’, a deeply felt poem about a young woman who was gang-raped. However, while one has no quarrels with the intensity and the genuineness of feeling that informs this poem, it does seem as though this difficult theme evades the poet’s grasp.
The fact that Shanta’s work is a product of two linguistic cultures—Oriya and English—is a fact that she works deftly and to her creative advantage. Her poem ‘Loose Talk’ provides a neat little history of her bi-lingual universe, describing the action of critics who, like “ ruthless children pelted my forked-/tongue ”. Shanta speaks too of being “ drunk with the variousness of the world .” And thus she progresses from the seemingly small canvas of the personal to the larger canvas that awaits her in the world outside. It is all too easy, indeed it is fashionable, for one to dismiss poems that are rooted in personal experience. Especially if the poet in question happens to be a woman. The richness of Shanta’s poems are evidence of the fact that this sort of dismissal is both thoughtless and short-sighted. In order to take flight, a poem must sometimes wait on the wings of the personal.
Imagine; Shanta Acharya, HarperCollins, ₹399.
K. Srilata is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic.
