Arundhathi Subramaniam in Kavya
Bharati
Jerry Pinto’s debut collection of poems, Asylum
(Allied, 2004) is a book that reminds you that precision
and passion needn’t be mutually exclusive. They
can be complementary, even an inseparable part of the
poetic enterprise.
Pinto’s book tries its hand at several modes and
approaches that engage the reader at various levels.
There is the lively conceit poem, ‘Alphabet Soup’,
as well as a small grove of ‘tree’ poems,
some haiku-like in their elliptical pictorial style:
‘You are not a baobab./ You are a complacent,
middle-class/ Clerk-in-a-sari/ Who would not share her
chestnuts.’ (‘Tree 4). There is the strangely
disquieting prose poem, ‘Sleep’. There is
the narrative poem, ‘Incident at Chira Bazaar’
and the still-life poem, ‘Dadiba’s Matka’
(which reminds you just how animated still-life can
be). There are ironic poems (‘Well, If You’re
A Poet, Write Me A Poem’), and poems of wry self-deprecation:
‘And I know that another body awaits me/ And another,
another./ Each rebellious, different, uncompromising/
Built in with state-of-the-art aches’ (‘At
Thirty’).
There is a poem – my personal favourite -- that
offers a comic-apocalyptic vision in which paper mutinies
against a bewildered humanity, ushering in a terrifying
world: ‘Rivers black with ink/ Bank notes printed
with runes/ Textbooks in lost languages/ And poetry
replaced by Reader’s Digest mailers’ (‘The
Quiet Rebellion of Paper’). Appropriately, images
pervade this vividly dystopic poem thickly, profusely,
and in ‘kamikaze squads’. And yet, the poet
is also capable of restraint and effective understatement
when required, as in ‘For Allan Whom I Never Saw’
(‘Only a baby could be distracted/ From the important
business of dying’) or ‘Rictus’, a
poem about the death of a parent: ‘What flows
out of his body?/ Ordinary dreams and old fables/ A
few riddles, a moral of two, some gaps/ The last fear.’
But the poems that stand out in this collection, to
my mind, are those that grapple with a welter of emotions
– raw, messy, contradictory, unsettling, often
overwhelming. The operative word is ‘grapple’,
for the poet does not resort to the easy options: pat
irony, intellectualism or sentimentality. The result
is poetry that allows itself awkward angles, edges,
jagged pauses, hoarse moments, uneasy alliances between
imagistic spareness and excess. There is a capacity
for vulnerability, for self-implication, an acknowledgement
of a soiled self that finds it difficult to forgive
itself. This is a voice that realises that ‘clerks,
like poets, need to dream’, but then finds it
has to deal with the complex demands attendant on the
decision to be inclusive, on the acceptance of contradiction,
even dysfunction.
And so you have the teacher who longs to tell his students
that he has ‘wanted to ask the same questions’,
and has ‘accepted the same lies’. There
is the lover’s need for resolution: ‘Do
you live in terror of a chance meeting/ A semaphored
recognition, a face jerked away? …I do.’
And there is the need to bridge the emotional impasse
with a parent: ‘I wish I could keep my heart unguilty,
my love fresh/ My thoughts wide-ranging, my eyes new…’
What makes these moments work is the fact that they
are arrived at through a journey – sometimes shared,
sometimes implicit – that is as existential as
it is linguistic. ‘Asylum’ offers
us a voice that is accomplished enough to acknowledge
those areas where accomplishment must be abandoned,
craft surrendered. Pinto’s poetic skill lies in
knowing when to make that surrender.
|
;){kind=link}