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Literary Review
Poetry
Many moments of poise
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Here is a poet who has found her stride, aligning content and craft. ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
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I HAVE read three fine first books of poetry these past few months — all three by Indian women. There was Street on the Hill, a wonderfully textured volume by Anjum Hasan; Touch, an exuberant collection by
Meena Kandasamy; and most recently, Sight May Strike You Blind by Sampurna Chattarji. Interestingly, the first and last are part of the Navodaya Scheme initiated by the Sahitya Akademi. Having established its credibility with these boo
ks, one hopes that this New Writers scheme will grow from strength to strength.
Sampurna Chattarji’s is a strong and accomplished debut. To read this book is to travel with a writer of growing depth and maturity. Chattarji’s work wrestles with bigger challenges, grows more poised, less self-conscious as the book progresses, culminating in the most rewarding sections of the book: Word, Walk on Glass, Sight Readings and Object Lessons.
Carefully crafted
I choose to focus on these sections because they contain, to my mind, some of the strongest poems in the collection. One senses here a poet who has come into her own, found her stride, been able to align content and craft, preoccupation and poetic voice. My personal preference is for the longer poems in these sections. There is a limbered-up quality here, a well-modulated ease, no persistent need to flash assonance and alliteration, no impulse to flaunt one’s skills. And yet, the skills are very much there, for, craft, thankfully, is not a dirty word in Chattarji’s book. As the poet allows the scale of her vision to widen, she finds she’s equal to the task. The result: poetry of verbal muscle, formal flexibility and control, intellectual curiosity, an ability (particularly in the last section) to throw away a line, toss in an image without overworking it, while operating, like every poet must, on more levels than one.
Keeping the balance
“Object Lesson: Eight” is a reflection on an egg. Can one talk about eggs without turning metaphysical? Perhaps not. And yet, the challenge for the poet is to find that creative tension between the abstract and the concrete, the general and the specific, taking care to sound neither grandiose nor trite. Chattarji locates that moment of elusive poise here: “Not the golden egg of fairytale/ not dawn not fragile not eaten not born/ I see conspiracies in your shape./ I see enclosure, and escape.”
Her other strength is tonal suppleness. This understanding of verbal “weight” enables her to combine the grave and the whimsical in the course of a single poem, sometimes making the insightful moment converge delightfully with the playful. This saves the poetry from an oracular cadence and simultaneously rescues it from the facile (which her frequent rhymes could sometimes lull you into suspecting).
Take “Object Lesson: Three”, a meditation on a tea-set. There is fascination here with perspective, detail, the stories engraved on china: “a cunning courtier and a Machiavellian monk prepare to show in/ (let out)/ two noblewomen poised between indecision and doubt”. But there is also the tonal shift of the last section, the “sips” of narrative giving way to mock-instructional mode and epigrammatic finality: “A cold day./ Put the lid on it./ Keep the stories warm.”
I particularly savoured some city images in the book. Consider “Still Life in Motion”: “Everyday the city grows taller, trampling underfoot/ students wives lovers babies…/ The sky strides/ inland on giant stilts, unstoppable, shutting out the light”.
“Dogs, Mobs and Rock Concerts”, perhaps the finest poem in the book, is also a city poem. Surreal and ironic, it works as much for its dextrous handling of image as of tone. It leaves one looking forward to more.
Sight May Strike You Blind, Sampurna Chattarji, Sahitya Akademi, Rs. 50.
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