Poetry
A vast canvas
M.S. NAGARAJAN
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In a career spanning four decades, Daruwalla has handled almost all the themes under the sun and grown in stature.
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Collected Poems 1970-2005, Keki N. Daruwalla, Penguin India, p.376, Rs. 350.
THERE are poets like Philip Larkin who set themselves limited goals, work ceaselessly towards them with an eye on perfection. Their creative output may be slender but not certainly the worth of their creation. On the other hand, there are poets, like W.B. Yeats, who keep reinventing themselves all their lives. Their sweep is vast, output prolific since they experiment with diverse forms of poetic expression. Keki Daruwalla belongs to such an illustrious lineage.
New horizons
Since 1964, when his first composition saw the light of day, Daruwalla has been actively engaged in exploring newer vistas. In a career spanning four decades, he has to his credit nine volumes of poetry, besides a few short stories. He has handled almost all the themes under the sun and with years he has grown in stature. He has attempted diverse metrical patterns in his poems of varying lengths. Hs poems range from very short lyrics which look like limericks, vignettes, and fragments, to sonnets, elegies, dramatic monologues and longer poems of epical dimensions. Myths, cultural histories of nations, anecdotes, landscapes etc., form the themes in his huge poetic oeuvre.
Collected Poems (1970-2005) gathers together selections from Under Orion (1970), Apparitions in April (1971), Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000), The Map-Maker (2002), and New Poems (2000-2005). How sad that this 355-page volume, published by Penguin India, does not have the essential features one expects in a book. It does not carry a preface, introduction, page of contents, index, or even a simple title page.
Striking sonnet
The very first piece "Bypass" is the quintessential Daruwalla poem. It is a sonnet sequence in seven units. Like Frost's "The Road Not Taken", or Emily Dickinson's "Chariot", or Thom Gunn's "On the Move", the poem introspectively analyses the various choices available to man in his journey through life. The poet drives through an unchartered countryside, "leaving the city, shuttered with dogma", unsure whether "moving into or out of unbelief". The passage is from the dreaded past to an unknown future, haunted by the fear of death. It is the past you fear, loved body, image/ and loved voice resurrected are what you dread. The "wayside fakir" personifies easy solutions one may think of for his moral predicament. There is nowhere to go: "don't dream of elsewheres — there's no elsewhere to go." As the poem moves on, it builds on its native resources in form and diction. Full of uncertainties, there are no deft solutions for man's longing quest for direction. The poem ends with the finality and inevitability of life itself. One moves into the future, / even as it closes in. The conventional petrarchan form, enjambments and caesuras, images of life and death and the final statement in Shakespearean grand style regarding the irrevocability of death — an orchestration of all these make "Bypass" one of the most felicitous poems in the anthology.
His gentle satire comes off in the short poem "Draupadi":
The travails of Draupadi
are never-ending.
It seems— some people have it
in their bleeding stars:
first exploited by the Pandavas,
five to one,
then by the Kauravas,
hundred to one
and now by the feminists
in millions.
"Boat-ride along the Ganga", casts a wry look at the contradictions that abound in the life of a Hindu:
What plane of destiny have I arrived at
where corpse-fires and cooking-fires
burn side by side?
Daruwalla's sweep is breathtaking: be it mythologies, Greek and Hindu, social or political problems, personal relationships, he is most at home. And so is the case in the employment of verse medium: blank verse, free verse, heroic couplet, terza rima. Poems such as "Nurse and Sentinel", "The Happy Woman Speaks", "Love in Meerut", "The Mistress", "Don't Expect", "Living on Hyphens" stand out for their memorability.
As a rule, every Indian poet stretches and strains for achieving effect. Daruwalla, one must concede, is no exception. Everything is said to the point of exhaustion: there is no void for imagination to fill in. The hallmark of good poetry is suggestion (dhvani): it half reveals and half conceals. In poetry, the golden rule, as always, is: less is more.
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