POETRY
Capturing life in all its hues
LAKSHMI KANNAN
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There is a variety of poems that delight, move, or make you re-think... Looking In, Looking Out, Shanta Acharya, Headland Publications with the financial assistance of Arts Council, England, £7.50.
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IN her poem, "Of Magic and Men", Shanta Acharya writes about the wave of "miracles" that swept across Hindus all over the world, when deities "drank milk" that was lovingly given by the devotees. It received a kind of media coverage that lulled people into believing that such a thing actually "happened".
In a Hindu world of fantasy and fable,
myths, legends, gods and demons,
irrationality appears reasonable —
The clear light of day obfuscates while chaos enlightens.
These opening lines of the poem show us how the "event" was validated by everybody till, finally, the poet wryly remarks: "God's in heaven and all's wrong with the world", subverting Robert Browning's famous line from "Pippa's Song".
Interesting mix
Currently an Associate Director, Initiative on Foundation & Endowment Asset Management at the London Business School, Acharya did her doctoral study at Oxford. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard for two years before she joined Morgan Stanley Asset Management in London.
When you read poems by someone whose academic and professional background is an interesting mix of literature, business and finance, it raises your expectations. Sure enough, there is a wide variety of poems in this collection that alternately delight, move, or make you re-think as you absorb the complexity, sophistication and openness to experience in all its paradoxes and perplexity. One is in touch with a sharp intellect and an engaging mind that listens to its heart. We have poems that range from a fine, literary texture to ones that talk the savvy language of contemporary times exposed to business and the cyber world, for there are poems that may delight the geeks.
What you see and how you see, is something that the poet (and the person) turns inward, often with a healthy scepticism. At least, she is very, very conscious of veracity as something that could have multiple points because there can be different ways of looking at it. One brilliant exposition of vision comes through in the poem on a visit to an optician, "Prescription for Glasses". The symbol gets under your skin as you read
The optician adorned me with asteroid spectacles,
taking away my sight before restoring it back to me.
I was made to read the alphabets on his electric screen,
first with one eye and then the other but not with both;
letting it sink in that perfect vision was to be his gift.
After changing several lenses, the poet wonders:
"It was difficult to say: Is there optimal vision?
Much depends on how much you want to see,
He muttered, having explained my failure to see the world
as it is.
...
My life manageable with its ill-defined, frayed,
squinted edges.
...
Through the looking glass, I could see every
thing pretty much anyway I pleased.
The prescription was free.
Small wonder then, that her poetry sweeps up life in all its varying hues — sad, philosophic, elegiac when it deals with a sense of loss or witty when something calls for an antidote to face the absurdity of a situation.
A significant group of poems cluster around Acharya's responses to famous paintings in art galleries. Many of them are based on sacred themes such as the Annunciation, The Saviour, The Vision of St. John and are classics in their own right. She experiences them and makes them come vividly alive in her poems till we get another alternate vivid picture so that we have two versions of a theme — one, the painting and the other, Acharya's poem on it. It is largely the language, the tone, and the association of her ideas and images that conjures an appropriate "mood" for a theme. The penetrating eyes of the monk in the painting by Andrey Rublyov in the Tretyakov gallery haunts her, and she concludes her poem "The Saviour" with these lines:
High there, unable to shake off your stare
resuscitating me with lungful of air,
I return to majesty's gashed gold-vermilion,
worship at the frayed edges of perfection.
"The Milkmaid" recaptures a painting by the 17th century Dutch painter who raised domestic scenes to a high level of art by his appealing simplicity and the flow of his lines. Sensuously, the poem takes in the textured newness of freshly baked bread on the table, catching the lambent light on the milkmaid as she pours milk from one earthenware vessel to another. Back again in the poem "Broken Glass", Vermeer is remembered for the kind of light she saw on the blue eyes of her lover. Life in art, art in life.
The collection of poems show a versatile range of style. If "Broken Glass" goes moist with the loss of something dear that we inevitably have to come to terms with, there are poems that strike an interestingly different tone in their verbal virtuosity. There are poems that computer-savvy geeks may relate to and one hopes they get to read them or are invited for a reading by Acharya. Here's a sample from the poem "Dear Tech Support":
Last year I upgraded Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0
and noticed a distinct slowing down in the performance
of the flower, jewellery and other network applications
that had operated flawlessly in the Boyfriend system.
Husband 1.0 has un-installed valuable programmes,
such as Romance 9.0, Night-out 6.0. Real Passion 10.0
and automatically installed many undesirable programmes-
Cricket 5.0, Football 8.0 and News Eternal 9.0.
The Conversation programme no longer runs as before,
and House-Cleaning 4.0 simply crashes the system.
After more delectable details, the poem concludes with an appeal for urgent help: "What help can you provide, dear Tech Support, in restoring Husband 1.0 to the default configuration of Boyfriend 5.0?"
It is tempting to conclude with the lines from a poem that can be both playful and profound. "What You Don't Know" is a poem that one mulls over, long after one has closed the book:
Growing up is a process of knowing,
of knowing that you don't know;
acknowledging others might know,
though they don't know that you don't know.
Wisdom comes when you forget what you know,
when your parents, friends, lovers, well-wishers,
even your enemies, your best teachers, don't know;
for what is worth is what you don't know.
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