Poetry lovers know the thrill of holding a new beautifully produced volume in their hands. Even if the poet is known, you don’t always know what to expect, for a good poet is a chameleon, and her work changes from volume to volume. I have been acquainted with Sridala Swami’s poetry for half a decade, and admired her writing. Still the volume took me by surprise.
We will put aside the eye-catching Jehangir Sabhavala painting on the cover, and the fact that the book is priced very reasonably. The poetry matches the Aleph production. It is almost de rigueur with poetry today that you need to say things in an unusual way. At night ‘ a streetlamp throws a ladder of light ’; an animal’s ‘ tail lashes at the hinges ’. In the poem ‘Perforation’, Sridala Swami says “ wring out the confessions before they are put out to dry ,” image and metaphor coalescing splendidly in one line.
Escape Artist is divided into five sections. The book starts with ‘Hypersomnia’, excessive sleep, (I looked up the dictionary) and is followed by ‘Daybreak’: “ It is not so much the blade of day/ that slices the eye open/ as that it begins anyway/ uncoerced and softly spoken. ” The poem ends with “ Morning comes like a man used to/lying awake waiting for tomorrow. ” It is not just the seamlessness of time she is talking of, but also the lack of anything eventful. I almost see a whiff of the French existentialists here. Now and then, only now and then, does she move into the surreal. In ‘Chimera’, a door begins a chant, an incantation, “ an appeasement/to what is alive but not yet risen. ”
In the poem ‘Not Loss but Residue’, we have a cussed love poem where she wants all the power ‘ to keep you waiting on my words,/ measure my satisfaction in your loss. Just for once. ’ The section ends with ‘The Twinning of Cities’ which is obviously not just about Hyderabad and Secunderabad, not just about the old city ‘ flattened with the weight of four centuries. ’ Nor is it about ‘ a geography of memory ’, meaning looking for a city which has changed irrevocably, digging into ‘ graves of nostalgia ’. Sridala turns the poem into metaphor, for the city has ‘ boundaries within its own body ’, and you would need an escort, a passport to go there. Side by side she brings the reader to the reality of a politically torn Hyderabad today. Cleverly done and yet the effort doesn’t show.
The second section has more of death in it, starting with a poem where after an untimely death, we find not one purifying fire among five priests, who leave the mourners with mustard seeds and the advice “ live as if nothing had happened. ” Another poem, ‘Slip Dreams’, has a vulture entering her dream. Her identity also gets a look-in. The dream tells her, “ I see you as you really are. ” “ What am I? ” she wants to shoot back, but doesn’t. Later we find she is “ picked clean by the man in the dream. ” The section ends with an absolutely brilliant poem called ‘Post Mortem’.
Sridala Swami’s poems are suggestive, rich in implication. Unlike some Indian authors, she does not hammer a point home. A poet is not an ideologue or a doctrinal fanatic. Her words seem to withdraw when they are on the brink of the definitive. She takes an oblique view about mundane matters. “ Passport photographs are libellous ” she says in her poem ‘Synaesthetic’. When a likeness is asked for, one should send “ a picture of your voice instead. ” A whole poem on “ abstract thumb-impressions ” and spectrographs follows, ending with how names are pronounced by loved ones.
The variety is commendable, there are poems on falls, Icarus, explosions and wings of fire dropping from the sky, chromatography, and clairvoyance. At times you feel a poem by her is a spool of the existential turning on a spindle. She doesn’t shy away from tackling difficult subjects and revels in the unusual: “ The word carrying/ scare quotes/ on its head/ like horns. ” Like all good poets, Sridala Swami creates her own aesthetic.
