It’s often been claimed that poets wear ‘armour’, a shield against the scepticism and scorn of those who are bewildered by its contemporary form and against the vast hordes (‘the peanut-crunching crowd’, as one poet put it) who consider poetry a ‘hobby’, a pleasant but irrelevant ‘pastime’. Gieve Patel’s armour is of a different kind: his poetry is a defence against the genuine physical, and mental, anguish he has encountered as a practising GP in Mumbai.
Now retired, his years as a doctor have left indelible wounds in his work, scars which have not quite healed. Several poems in his ‘Collected’ bear the bruises which he may have remedied physically but whose after-effects linger on.
There are poets who have been prescribed poetry as therapy by their shrinks, though I don’t think Patel belongs to this category. His poems go far beyond the personal or the so-called ‘confessional’, as he attempts to come to grips with the overpowering reality around him.
Although over a span of 50-odd years, he has published just three books of poems, the end result is not one of paucity but hard-won poetry that has come to fruition after some severe wrestling with his conscience, as in the concluding lines of this early poem, ‘Old Man’s Death’, where a friend of the deceased finds ‘ He cannot mourn/ The quick and easy changes:/ A sprinkling of water,/ The disappearance of an odour,/ A turn of bed-sheets, leaving /A bed, a chair,/ Perhaps a whole room,/ With clarity in them .’
Waiting for touchdown
Spare images and crystalline clarity are, however, not usually this poet’s objective. The poems are mostly dense and tightly packed and use virtually no formal structures like couplets or strict stanzas. They are at times difficult to unravel and some of the poems are indeterminate, leaving the reader hovering in the air with little prospects of a touchdown.
But most of them convey a feeling of fascination-cum-revulsion, bordering even on misanthropy, as the poet grapples with a conscience that will not be satisfied by easy answers. As Arundhathi Subramaniam underlines in her introduction with her remarks on Patel’s well-known poem ‘On Killing a Tree’: “It was my first realisation that a gaze unclouded by sentiment could evoke something truer than sympathy. That an unspoken poignancy could lie in the act of not averting one’s gaze.”
Patel, for the most part, certainly doesn’t avert his gaze. In content, this is a substantial body of work and even the awkwardness in some of the lines and line breaks have an intrinsic, genuine quality to them, though, despite repeated readings, I’ve never quite understood the poem ‘The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim Nor Hindu in India.’ But perhaps other readers from India’s many minorities have successfully deciphered it.
I am also unable to come to terms with ‘Hill Station’ in which a ‘ hideously silent ’ (why hideous?) couple occupy a hotel
room and the poet, somewhat voyeuristically, strains ‘ To hear a squeak of bedsprings’ as ‘ Behind/ A rising growl in my mind/ Their sexual life looms /Like a poisoned cloud .’ The apparent disgust and disdain are inexplicable. After all, it’s only a couple having fun.
More pertinently, ‘University’, on the cold-blooded annihilation of hundreds of students and teachers by the Pakistani army at Dacca University during the liberation struggle of Bangladesh in 1971, tries to come to grips with the tragedy with empty, rhetorical lines like ‘ Yesterday’s chicken meal saw/ No less significant a slaughter ’ and ends with ‘ May your odour rise and trip up/ Our brains. Tell us/ To change our thought ’ . Given the immensity of the suffering and the loss of an entire generation, these concluding lines are tame and prosaic. The human dimension of the tragedy, if attempted to be explored in verse, needs to be far more heartfelt.
Patel is very much a Bombay poet, and it’s always a source of wonder why so many poets in English have emerged from here. Possibly because even in a notoriously subjective critical climate, there’s been an interactive, hortative culture behind the scenes that has encouraged the art, even though there is no particular ‘Bombay school’, like, say, the Black Mountain poets in the U.S.
A word on the publisher, Poetrywala, based in Bombay and run by Marathi poet Hemant Divate. This small press has, over the years, filled a huge vacuum left by mainstream publishers, who, as far as I know, don’t even have poetry editors. Poetrywala and a few small publishers have kept the flag of poetry fluttering at full mast.
The writer has edited Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa and Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century.
Collected Poems; Gieve Patel, Poetrywala, ₹350
