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Literary Review
The good and the indifferent
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A review of Daruwalla's The Map-maker and Smita Agarwal's Wish-granting Words by MANOHAR SHETTY.
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THE literary editor of a newsmagazine has recommended the writing of poetry as an exercise to get back into the groove when a writer engaged in the apparently more serious function of producing a novel is stuck for words. Much like a session of net practice before venturing into the Big Game. Poetry, the editor says in flippant journalese, is something "do-able". A novelist maintains that he has "progressed" into prose after writing poetry earlier in his career. It isn't clear whether the "doer" or the "progressed" novelist wrote successful poems. More likely in both cases the verse produced will be of the "Home & Garden" variety, publishable only in some "Poet's Corner" or "Poet's Pasture" column, the convenient dumping ground for literary garbage so beloved of our Sunday newspapers. These facile and idiotic perceptions on the making of poetry are apparently shared by the mainstream publishers who have abdicated all artistic responsibility by refusing to publish even good books of poems. It is easier now to publish a third-rate novel than a first-rate book of verse — unless you're the Prime Minister of India. The divide is so great that established poets with full-length manuscripts and more don't even bother to send them to the big publishers because these publishers simply don't have poetry editors they respect or peers in their field.
A prime example of philistine, step-motherly treatment is Keki N. Daruwalla. Ever since he arrived with the brilliant Under Orion way back in 1970, Daruwalla has been shunted about between six different publishers. The Map-maker is his ninth book of poems. Given his prolific output and consistent proficiency, it is testimony to the niggardly artistic heart of the big publishing houses that there hasn't even been a Selected — leave alone a Collected — volume of his poems. Adding fuel to the pyre is Oxford University Press' worldwide embargo since 1995 on the publication of individual collections of poetry. This august institution, the disseminating fount of disinterested knowledge, does not even plough back a miniscule fraction — which is all it takes to keep poetry alive — from the crores of profits it makes through the sales of dictionaries worldwide. A tax-exempt institution in the U.K., this Lofty Body has cravenly reneged on its role as the keeper of language.
The low profit-graph has, however, not deterred some smaller companies such as Ravi Dayal from publishing inexpensive volumes of poetry, elegantly produced, with a quiet consistency. In The Map-maker, Daruwalla takes up the reflective, meditative line from his last book, Night River. His range has expanded into tackling corners of history and mythology through long narrative stanzas and monologues. His subjects are diverse: a Hebrew professor escaping the Nazi pogroms, map-makers from Majorca, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Mehdi of Sudan and the beheading of Gordon, a scholar from Ghana who prefers to write on cocoa rather than the history of slavery in his land, and Farlimas, the story-teller who broke "the vicious cycle of regicide in the mythical past of Kordofan" in Sudan — this last a sustained piece of skilful narrative verse. The reflective and geographical range of Daruwalla has not diluted his sharp sense of observation and the use of the pithy metaphor and image as in these breathtaking ending lines of "Century-end Prayer":
And may the elephant shed his tusks
so that we don't shed his blood.
And a small skylight prayer, Lord:
May the sparrow know glass
from the crisp air outside.
With The Map-maker Daruwalla's own evolution as a poet is on an ascendant scale. In a career spanning over 30 years, "the knock at the slowly closing doors of the heart" ("Old Soldier") is still some way off. The Old Soldier has indeed not wasted the night "looking up/for astral fireworks that never came".
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A FEW astral fireworks could have lit up the work of Smita Agarwal. She can take a few lessons from the apparent ease with which Daruwalla conjures up eidetic metaphors. (And this shouldn't be too difficult since Daruwalla too figures in the long list in the Acknowledgements page.) There is a curious unfinished, unpolished look to much of her work. She uses too many words to take off. Consider this first stanza in "Our foster-nurse of nature is repose":
Lying in bed on a pure-white sheet, the
airconditioner whirring, I stare at the
strip-light and when my eyes smart
I turn and it seems, for the first time,
I consider your features.
Five prosaic lines to say virtually nothing. It's hard to defend such lines forced into rhyme as: "Fighting diabetes, your time you bide" and archaic ones like "Of the squat-boled tree/ that had birthed and borne me". The verbosity continues in poems such as "Monsoon Cantata" which opens with: "Rain is tattooing on the roof, tap-tapping On the tin sunshade of the kitchen window, Beating an insistent though erratic rhythm."
The literary editor of that newsmagazine will probably find this eminently do-able. A pity though that none of the innocent worthies Acknowledged by Smita Agarwal in her book had an eraser.
The Map-maker: Poems, Keki N. Daruwalla, Ravi Dayal, p.68, Rs. 90.
Wish-granting Words: Poems, Smita Agarwal, Ravi Dayal, p.43, Rs. 70.
Manohar Shetty has published three books of poems, including Domestic Creatures.
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