Does our small but well-guarded caliphate of happiness and personal gratification also produce a deep sense of deprivation and dislocation? Why does spring leave one disconsolate and restless? How does poetry through its equivocations and pauses equip us to jettison simple solution to the issues related to our life of desire mired in emotional upheavals? What prevents us from making a snide remark about demotic culture and antithetical views holds by others? Nuanced and intriguing answer to these unsettling questions can be found in the creative oracle actuated by Suhail Kakorvi whose collection of English poems “Effulgence” has just appeared.
As a skilful curator of words, Suhail, whose more than 700 couplets on a fruit Aam (mango), highlighting its nutritive value and aesthetic appeal across cultures, has fetched him a coveted entry in Limca Book of Records 2015, creates a multisensory narrative that makes us more wary about the violence of language that the media frequently employs. His dexterity acquaints with the inherent perversity that causes people to resist amicability and righteousness and prompts them to believe worst about the others. The assertiveness of enthusiastic adherence to some temporal aims for materialistic gains irks the narrator of the poems the most and he takes refuge in solipsistic questioning: Devil has assumed a disguise/and one would have no difficulty to find/Fingers and their movements/ Eyes fixed upon some aim/That is aimlessness/No rhyme no reason whatsoever/ and if unfortunately you want to be heard/ you are a fool of first water/because the disguised devil blocked sense of hearing/Rising voices have become cry in wilderness. From ‘Disguise’.
Suhail’s wandering eye goes beyond clichéd romantic explicit and rhetorical flourishes. Efforts to locate poet’s love in his real life seems to be a sort of obscenity as Suhail finds it an act of voyeurism and that is to be resisted vehemently. His laconic poems betray his most profound sentiments and sensibilities that enable the alert reader to conveniently arrive at a new way of living. Here one can also see how the narrator of the poems (not the poet himself) remerges from the deep waters of oblivion and wins the battle of memory against the forgetting. It owes much to lunacy in love: It has no beginning, no end either/only an intrigue is its synonym/I long ever that my beloved in love must remain higher/And wish she should reach par excellence in love lunacy /Oh! Certainly getting thy touch one rises beyond price/ Thou possess alchemy of that insanity of Love/ (from ‘Lunacy in Love’).
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The book carrying 138 poems primarily through ironic posing strike at the roots of the atmosphere of mutual distrust and animosity in which we live. Leafing through the poems one can discover the civilising power of poetry that could save us from barbarism and his creative outpourings unfailingly indicate a long struggle against the narrative of totality set in motion by all-encompassing commercialism. Suboor Usmani in his perceptive introduction aptly observes: “In many of his poems you will find that he has started a conversation with the pain you never knew existed within you.”
If Suhail’s poems are sifted through at once, one can see a strong urge for inner resolution through the myriad shades of poetic exploration and his intimate anecdotes refuse to be lost in the riptide of routine life.