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Literary Review
Effortless elegance
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Though some lines call for a grimace, Dom Moraes still has a way with words, says KEKI N. DARUWALLA.
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ANY poetry volume from Dom Moraes, India's finest poet in English, is welcome. A volume containing new and selected poems, 115 of them , is doubly so. Yeti Books, who have earlier published Anita Nair and C.P. Surendran, need to be congratulated.
A volume of Dom's collected poems was brought out in a 167-page book by Penguin India in 1987. From 1965, when he published his third volume, John Nobody, till 1987 Dom had not published another book, except for a private collection (just a 100 copies) called Absences in 1983. I hold one of these copies. Quite a few poems in the present volume, like "Babur", "Cave", "Windows", "Sinbad" and "Merlin" for instance, have appeared earlier in both Absences and his Collected Poems.
The old favourites are here — "Two From Israel", "Rictus", "John Nobody". It shouldn't surprise anyone that a reader, voyeur like, can peep at the life of a poet through a volume like this. ("But there, last year, a moral issue rose,/ I grabbed my pen and galloped to attack./ My Rosinate trod on someone's toes./ A Government frowned and now I can't go back.") There is a desolate straight-from-the-heart poem on his ill mother. Brassiers, "ripened breasts" (never unripe), drink, pubs and unsteady legs of course appear on every fifth page. But as he balances himself with outstretched arms, "Even so great a gesture of the hands/ Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness."
His days as a "war correspondent" come through "codes tapped out in the dark". We see the "denuded nuns" of Kinshasa "blackly brassiered". (Do nuns in Kinshasa wear see-through habits?) Stained dead bodies, he admits, earn his "typewriter a banner byline." Only a true poet would be sensitive to such ironies. War correspondents write good copy, but not necessarily good verse. In a poem "Mission" one encounters bad lines like "smoke of their breakfasts below/ Like grey unfrightened wings of doves". Even if we concede that from an aircraft smoke looks like a dove's wings (which it doesn't) why should it look like "unfrightened wings" and not frightened ones? In the last line smoke rises from below like "angels from the forest." But such diffuse imagery marks the young and unsure Dom Moraes, precocious though he always was. His touch becomes surer with time and we have splendid new poems towards the end.
What one admires is the way Dom, halfway through a laid back poem, suddenly touches a deep chord in you, almost effortlessly. Bits of sky fall in a prince's eyes. A "prolonged vowel of silence" fills a square. "Runes of water are read in the desert." A world will be held together "by its variety of absences". At dusk a "concrete antheap... shudders awake and switches on its eyes," in some godforsaken urban landscape. A cyclone leaves behind a "shroud of seabirds." A desultory poem on Sinbad comes alive when we are told that a "wind defines its own course" and that "some of us never know home". Sinbad surely didn't. One will not know easily if this is biographical, for Dom Moraes himself has lived in two countries and within two cultures.
Moraes takes up an ordinary aluminium container as a subject but turns to containers of love which are constantly tampered with by hands which "don't know what it is to handle love or death". He is excellent at these switches. A poem , "Tribal" which starts with a ferned cave and its "thousand stalactites of rain" (what a lovely line) will end with the protagonist resting his head "on your belly/ my sister with the taut breasts." And he has a unique poetic way of describing objects — "hawks in a hot concentric ecstasy" and "snailcoloured boulders slimed with early mist". Which doesn't mean that he can't turn out an awkward line or two that really grates: "and I from my carapace/ have emerged for a last lonely grimace/ at what I was or am, under saturnine stars". Those lines surely call for a grimace.
A poem "Dancer" left me uneasy. He builds up the dance, the ritual flash of her eyes, as she "stamps/ her small bare feet in triumph. Lanka burns./ Chancred with buds of fire, Ravan dies". So far so good. But then "she flies/ back to the forest where her husbands wait... " Is he confusing Sita with Draupadi, you wonder? Later "dressed in music" she "embraced the pyre". Sita was swallowed up by the earth, as we all know. Why did Moraes have to tread on such unsure ground?
But the poems towards the end are splendid. Poems like "The Third Truth", "Identity", and "Twelve Days in April" are classics. This is a fine book containing some of the best poems of Dom Moraes, easily our most gifted poet.
Typed with One Finger, Dom Moraes,Yeti Books, p.211, Rs. 250.
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