POETRY
Graceful arc
ANJUM HASAN
|
Tishani Doshi evokes and then relies on moods to carry poems along.
|
Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi, Aark Arts, 2006, price not stated.
TISHANI DOSHI is one of half a dozen English language poets who have recently published first collections, something which signals, if not an efflorescence in Indian English poetry, then at least a determined sense of continuity. This is worth celebrating, as is the fact that a first book like hers is not a hasty compendium of early poems but clearly aspires to the logic of a collection.
Well produced
Countries of the Body is also very well produced, which, with notable exceptions (e.g. the marvellous editions produced by Clearing House in the 1970s and 80s) is not exactly something one associates with poetry books in this country. The news that the collection has won the year's prestigious Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in the U.K. only adds to one's sense of expectancy about Tishani's work.
There is an earnestness, as much about poetry as about its subjects, that underlies this collection. Tishani's poems are thoughtfully crafted, economical, graceful in the way they echo the rhythm of a long breath being exhaled, or something describing a wide arc before it lands. She is sensitive to nuance, takes great pleasure in the physicality of things, evokes and then relies on moods to carry poems along. The confident exactness with which she can deliver lines makes the reader want to believe her at once: "I am miles from home, in Mombassa,/ Putting diamonds in my ears/ Like a woman with three names/ Instead of one" or "Rilke is following me everywhere/ With his tailor-made suits/And vegetarian smile" or "I forgot how Madras loves noise — /Loves neighbours and pregnant women/ And Gods and babies".
Things that don't work
I am less enthusiastic about the poems in which Tishani gives in to her love of extended metaphor. After a while, the idea that the body is a lonely tree-trunk, or is synonymous with the sea, or can, as in the title, be likened to one or many countries, begins to pall. Such conceits work better when imagined with some degree of loopiness, as for instance in the work of the American poet Sharon Olds who also writes a great deal about the body. I thought especially of Olds' poem "Topography" which takes the body as a country metaphor literarily by imagining two bodies against each other — "... like maps laid/ face to face, East to West, my/ San Francisco against your New York, your/ Fire Island against my Sonoma, my/ New Orleans deep in your Texas... " The poem ends with all the States united into one nation "with liberty and justice for all"!
Tishani, on the other hand, gives in to an airiness that makes it possible to read the metaphorical poems without the eye being arrested by very much. Her language here weakens as well. One glazes over when presented too often with phrases such as "the tarnished weight of dreams", "subterranean pillars of inconsistency", "the corrugated boundaries of myth", "a country of dreams" and "the dark estuary of the day".
The importance of location
I admire the more experiential poems in Countries of the Body. Several of these concern death or tragedy — poems on the tsunami, on a brother losing his mind, on the suicide of an aunt. The themes give the poems urgency, clarity and very importantly, a location. The wilful and random associations that run through some of the other poems can start to sound self-indulgent when they're completely unhinged from experience. It will be good to see Tishani developing in the direction of poems where she takes emotions and occurrences to be tangible things with clear outlines, but things that can nevertheless be stripped of their everydayness to reveal how "... underneath, there is a sadness we know nothing about."
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
