One advice I would like to give my tribe of fellow reviewers, please review after you have read the book, rather than before — though, in our line of business, space needs be kept for both exigencies. E.V. Ramakrishnan is an old friend, who once taught English at South Gujarat University in Surat — a no-nonsense man, and writer of solid poetry, as is shown in his latest book, Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe.
Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of all blurbs, has felt his pulse unerringly, as she talks of his poetry “often veering at the edge of axiom”. This would have brought a better reviewer than me to the ultimate question, whether it is the job of the poet to reach to the final truth, the riddle of Eliot’s “overwhelming question” at the end of a still un-electrified tunnel.
Never shout slogans. They will scald your
larynx and infect your lungs’ inner linings.
You will gasp for each word you speak later.
An unusual poet
But irrespective of what my poet-friend says, get me a crowd and a hailer and I will shout slogans for pro-Dalit intellectuals being harassed by the pro-Peshwa police of Pune, please enjoy the alliteration. The next stanza reads:
Never read the sacred texts. They are thick
with sorrows of those killed in their
names. Be an illiterate to know the sacred.
Some poems are unforgettable: like ‘One Such Man’ who knew how birds predicted/ the coming famine… and The sealed envelope/ of the night lay in his lap . An exceptional poet though he is, I must be true to my reviewer’s dharma — to castigate.
One flaw I found in the volume is when he says a bus engine flutters. Sorry, bird-feathers flutter, an engine sputters or splutters.
Whorelight, a first volume by Linda Ashok, with a Foreword by George Szirtes, is a whimsical and unusual book by an unusual poet. Fancy these first lines from the poem ‘Hymn for the Man by Periyar’: this thick yarn of emptiness/ is all I have to feel warm/ in your absence . The poem ends with the lines when the moon spills over Periyar,/ don’t drown yourself/ This love is not safe. The beauty of those waters and the response they arouse could hardly have been brought out more delicately. Linda is a difficult poet to pin down; best to let her speak for herself. Here she is writing on a dead deer.
The buds in my garden respond to such grief with a refusal to open up their petals in full light. Air, dank with sorrow, makes my garden smell like a cemetery. Ghosts juggle in the bath under feet and I can only hear a trombone, a devastating note grafted by the wind on my broken cello still living with a heart and two kidneys.
And Linda leaves images behind. Running through the tide in the morning light she says, My feet, wet and luminous. My nails, little glass screens offering a preview of the undersea, of debris forming new structures. Linda has been a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Chichester, U.K. She is the chief spirit behind the RædLeaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts that has been funding the RL Poetry Award since 2013.
Do your homework
A winner of this award in 2016 is Barnali Ray Shukla for her book Apostrophe. She has a bit of the elusive grace of Linda. Take this short poem, ‘Inkpot’:
Run your pen through your wounds,
blues drip till the diaphragm,
words molt and take wing
still wet with the last gasp,
don’t let this stab heal .
‘And Cupid’ is a fine poem about a villa which had wings and was perched in the middle of a coconut grove and solitude . There’s a family tree
Under the shade of which lazed sonatas,
Few secrets and reflections in oblique light…
And then one day time moved faster,
tide pounded decisions, reflections distorted.
Sonatas were draped in dust like the grand piano.
Burgundy hard-covers made way for moth and silver ants…
Bravo Shukla, no one can grudge you that award; which brings me to doling out further advice to reviewers. First draft, slam the book, second draft, praise it. Then a third, which is balanced, by which time you may be dead. But then as we Punjabis say, kee farak painda ?
Lastly we come to Paper Asylum by Rochelle Potkar. It’s tough reviewing this as a poetry book because much of it is prose. And the few poems that grace the book are — hey Prabhu — either Haibun or Tanka. So another dollop of advice to my tribe — if you don’t know a poetic form, don’t critique the poems. The Japanese will reach for their samurais if you make a fool of yourself. But I need to educate my readers. Tanka is a Japanese form written in 31 syllables in five rhythmic lines.
The poem takes a subtle turn with the central line. Haibun combines Haiku and prose, and takes its name from a 17th century monk poet, Matsuo Bashō. Am unprepared, will revert to Rochelle briefly in the next column. Two heavyweights are waiting in the wings already, putting on their gloves — Gieve Patel and Ranjit Hoskote.
And here’s something reviewers should never do — discuss books they have written an introduction to. Jhilmil Breckenridge’s Reclamation Song is grounded in pain, her sons being taken away from her, and she forced into a shrink’s care. Indian poetry in English doesn’t have another example of such visceral confessional poetry.
The writer is a poet and novelist.
