POETRY
Two different kinds of craft
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While Kannan's poems have an inherent lyricism, Dyson's poems are like prose paragraphs chopped up into line lengths, says MALATI MATHUR.
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Experimentation is all very fine... But, forgive me for being so old-fashioned as to expect that poetry should be, well, poetic.
In That Sense You Touched It, Ketaki Kushari Dyson; Unquiet Waters, Lakshmi Kannan; Sahitya Akademi, p.193, Rs.90.
BEING an inveterate back-to-front reader, on picking up this double-decker volume of poems, I browsed through Kannan's poetry first, which, as it turned out, was a mistake.
There is a depth and sensuousness that pervades Lakshmi Kannan's poetry, the first person narration lending an intensity and intimacy to the whole exercise. There is an evocative use of language as when she describes the sound of a conch shell as a "brown voice", hair is like "spun dreams" or when the mildness and gentleness of the February sun is compared to a "mother's scolding".
River as a metaphor
And running throughout, like a subterranean stream is the leitmotif of the collection — the flowing of rivers and their metaphorical counterpart in a woman's life. The river Gomti, for instance, when quiescent, is ignored and taken for granted like a submissive woman. But when she assumes the form of an avenging Durga, she reveals a shape and identity that makes people sit up and take notice. Ponni, the sacred Cauvery, is the essence of womanhood that takes in everything, reveals nothing and is inexorable in its flow. And in keeping with the image of river as woman, the water is pictured in terms of the soft, rippling, satiny folds of a sari...
Woman forms the scaffolding of many of the poems, much as she does in our real lives. She is present as mother; as the nurturer of the "family tree", who, once the family is grown and spread, is then left uncared for; as the repressed, dispossessed victim of a patriarchal society and as a wife remembering her late husband with touching tenderness. She is also the mother who sets her children afloat on the stream of life like flickering flames in a leaf bowl sent on their way on the sacred river in a rich and telling metaphor. In "Braided Lives", three generations of women braid each other's hair and as the poem progresses, the braid comes to represent the intricate weaving of Time itself, the three strands of the braid like the three participants moving in the dance of life.
Kannan also talks about the creative aspect of the poet's task and the evanescent nature of inspiration in "The Poem" — a piece that is remarkably suggestive of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Creation is inextricably linked to the elephant god Ganesha, evoked with great affection in many of the poems.
An anti-climax
AFTER the lyrical intensity and poignancy of Kannan's poetry, I came to Dyson's offerings in a kind of anti-climax. While it is not necessary for poems to be written in rhyming lines or to follow a strict metre, they should not be dashed off like prose paragraphs chopped up into line lengths. Many of them are anecdotal and the poem, "Making Sambar" could well have been featured as a "middle" on the editorial page of a newspaper.
In spite of some original images that lend an interesting texture to her writing — her description of migratory birds scudding south "on seared autumnal wings" or "multicultural dead" to describe the thousands of all religions who died in the famines of Bengal, for instance — there are unfortunate collocations as well. Mary, mother of Jesus, is portrayed as having achieved "global celebrity" and in an otherwise unusual poem on the moon which talks of an eclipse with imagination and creativity, the sun is described as giving radiance to a sliver of rock, making it "night's hot spot". Her account of the lamentation of dogs is reminiscent of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" while the conversational tone employed in some pieces — "honey rifled from who knows what hive" — is almost Frostian in its directness and immediacy. The earth is described as a "wicked witch with a slipped disc" for its propensity to cause devastating earthquakes. She speaks of God or the gods with a delightful irreverence that never approaches blasphemy.
Hidden connections
Dyson states in her introduction that she is trying to find connections in apparently discrete events which are hidden from view. Unfortunately, she does not always succeed and the connection remains hidden from the reader till the end. Her poems do not ride, to borrow Frost's phrase, like a piece of ice on a hot stove to their own melting. And this is where I realised my mistake in reading Kannan's poems first. For their inherent lyricism had spoiled me so that the almost prose-like pieces of Dyson found no resonating echo from my soul. Experimentation is all very fine and nowadays, obscurity of thought and linkages is considered profound. But, forgive me for being so old-fashioned as to expect that poetry should be, well, poetic.
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