Poetry
Unusual vision
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
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A striking collection of poems from one of the finest poets writing in India today…
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Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Arundhathi Subaramaniam, Bloodaxe Publishers, £8.95.
Recently, during a poetry reading byArundhathi Subramaniam at Varanasi, I was surprised that the chairperson introducing her had no idea who she was. I had half a mind to shout out loud that she was one of the finest poets writing in the country today. But, as usual, inertia won the day. This volume contains new poems as well as selections from her first book On Cleaning Bookshelvesand the second Where I Live, and has been brought out by Bloodaxe, the most prominent publisher of poetry in England.
The first thing that strikes one, apart from the deft way she uses language, is the unusual way she looks at things. She will start by saying she is wearing her mother's sari. After that line, don't expect a mention of Kanjeevaram or chiffon.
I am wearing my mother's sari, /her blood group /her osteo-arthritic knee.
The pairing goes on, the crushes the mother-daughter duo had on celebrities, the way they use language till “ I grow stealthily/ into her body.” The poem is aptly and splendidly titled “Sharecropping”.
Unique perspectives
To repeat, it is the oblique phrase that ambushes the reader page after page. In a cardiac unit, even the shadowless illumination is disinfected. The language is unique not only because she is excellent at spinning the yarn of language across her poetic loom, but because her perspectives are different. For instance, take the line, “ Faith spreads like the hum of crickets”,where sound and spirit get conjoined so effectively. The volume would be remembered for its striking lines/images — ‘the ferment of crickets', ‘moon-lathered Parthenon', ‘lurching empires of the sea', ‘ dark, deccan bodies supple as bowstrings'.
In a poem like “Archivist”, she weaves various strands. First the lover has to be ‘documented' “ out of the corner of the eye/ where the retina bleeds/ into the imagination”.So far you don't know where the poem is heading. Then you enter taxonomy; Arundhathi takes sadistic delight in driving reviewers to the dictionary.We are into principles of classification. A normal poet would have been satisfied talking of pigeonholes etc. Not Subramaniam. Even the lover's body has to be segmented, “ cleaved into zones—/ the austere collage of seasons/ that is his face,/ and the caesura of the navel…” As a fellow poet I turn pale at the audacity of the concept and the aplomb with which she has carried it out.
Like some other fine South Indian poets, Ramanujan and Parthasarathy, for instance, she is strong on family bonds. Her grandmother, “ wise even at eight/ hid under her bed/ when her first suitor came home.” But even as she “ stirs ancestral aromas” in the kitchen, she will bequeath her recipes and genes but never her secret longings for “ dark forbidden paramours whose eyes/ smoulder like lanterns in winter.” A lover's breath will come to her “ like the sigh of palmyra trees/in Tirunelveli plantations” (‘Demand'). Of a piece are the poems “Winter, Delhi, 1997” and “Madras”, which bring forth a lingering nostalgia for her childhood. When she writes of memories they seem to be on 3D film, so vividly are they portrayed.
Existential strain
More than the ambivalences the blurb talks about, it is the strong existential strain running through the volume that hits one, this business of living that has to be got through. She tackles the “ fragile ecosystems/ of hope and conversations and memory” that surround human intimacy. And yet the poems are not devoid of idiosyncrasy, for “ when the world arrives,/ gurgling in imperial anticipation” she says she is “ too far gone to care.” There are also whimsical moments in her poems when she is in a quandary — unsure whether to “dice” carrots or a lover.
It is not dulcet music that you hear in Where I Live. It's the swish of swordplay, each poem skewered at sabre-point and then placed on an electric grille to sizzle like a rasher on a barbecue.
As in life so in poetry, there's need for space, caesura — the moment that brings forth brief befogged epiphanies, Parashurama recognising Rama, “ between tenancies /form and reform”. The mode however is always demotic with Subramaniam, none of that high falutin high seriousness of Mathew Arnold and Indian language poets. The need of space is recognised “ so that some old mistakes can be made again/ and some not.” (“Interval”). The demotic leads to self effacement of sorts: “ To stand/in the vast howling rain-gouged/ openness of a page,/ asking the question/that has been asked before…/To leave no footprints/in the warm alluvium…/This was always a way /of keeping the faith.
This volume starts with the lines
‘I am for just this moment,/conquistador of the blank page'.
We need to accept her as the conquistador of the poetry page.
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