POETRY
Words from within
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`There is genuine attempt to locate, or rather create, poetry in life's real images and situations.'
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INDIAN English poetry nowadays rarely comes out of its "circles" and "societies" in the big cities. This is mainly because poets more or less address a favoured reader and/or encounter chosen realities. And, consequently, the language of poetry often doesn't get customised to the specificities of life that lie outside this preferred enclosure. It is in this context that Vasantha Surya's collection of poems, A Word between Us, becomes relevant. For, in it, there is genuine attempt to locate, or rather create, poetry in life's real images and situations.
"The need for poetry", Vasantha Surya believes, is to "tune us to that perfect pitch for which our poor synthesising souls scream". And, "in all this contemporary cacophony there persists a tingling thrum beyond the tympanum." For a poet with this sort of an ideation, it is easy to fall into the catch of the feigned spirituality that is getting currency, in as diverse shades from intense passion to total renunciation, found in women's poetry recently, the origin of which might be the yearning to transcend the limitations that the body and society impose upon individuals in their quest for a new self in the liberalised world.
But, in poetry, Vasantha Surya doesn't seek any metaphysical short cuts for down-to-earth realities. On the contrary, even the confessions that sound a bit devotional become revelations of one's societal predicament as in: "And so I shake myself awake/ from dreams of gods. / My waking hours are not for them. / Those I reserve / for the flawed co-beings of this maimed world/ who need me and whom I need / to heal hurts that only mortals feel" ("Do the Gods Exists?"). And the prayer is: "Goddess, / have the grace/ to prevent/ my loss of face" ("A Married Woman's Prayer").
What is central to the poems in this collection, as the title itself suggests, is the urge for conversation — "a fresh vowel, buoyant, to bear/ the weight of being" ("Meaning Well") — for breaking the silence that emanates from the feeling of being left alone in an "empty cell". But this too is eventually becoming a waiting, a "scrabbling in the earth (we stand on)/ for some forgotten tool of language", which gives the poems a tone of urgency and immediacy as in: "one moment more, / and I'd have missed/ the scene where the lovers/ almost kissed" ("Patriot").
Vasantha Surya is at her best when she is brief, exact and suggestive, all of which, one may presume, she might have inherited from her long acquaintance with Tamil literature, especially poetry — when she takes in images and metaphors, from everyday life, such as "Intensive Care", "Quick Fix", "Saree", "Cow" and "Scooter Ride". Also when she asks "the Landlord" to make some small noise for the sightless thoughts, rat like, to decide whether to run away or hide before he possesses the house, and when she advises the heart "to avoid pain and remain hidden within protecting bone and muscle".
And she is at her worst when she tries to disentangle philosophical knots of "being and nothingness" by asking "Why am I `me'? And so I/ Am I. Don't ask why." ("The World and I"). One wishes that these weedy ones had been avoided while compiling this collection.
A Word between Us, Vasantha Surya, Sandhya Publications, Rs. 50, $8.
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan is editor of Yeti Books and can be reached at rthachompoyil@yahoo.com
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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