Welcome to Indian Poetry – November 2009
“Song turns missile in battle”, says one poet. Another speaks of Mirza Ghalib’s ageing hands in which “a mirror of couplets” is “still held like a sword”. A third speaks of the alchemy that turns the language of lewd suggestion into poetry: “to the left in front of Rajmandir Cinema see two loafers hitting on a whore calling her so that in a little while you will begin to hear something like a love poem”.
The three poets in the twenty-second edition of the India domain bear very little resemblance to each other. They write in different languages: Telugu, English and Hindi. They belong to different generations: two were born in the 1940s (one at the beginning of the decade and the other in the latter half on the year of Indian Independence), while the third was born in the mid-seventies. Their bibliographies are of vastly differing lengths: one has over nine books to his credit, the other has four, and the third is yet to publish. Their poetics are varied: one tunes into the voice of the unconscious, another affirms the voice of the conscience.
Not surprisingly, this issue carries no single unifying theme. But as always, there are unexpected moments of correspondence, as we see in the excerpts selected above. For all three poets suddenly produce almost martial images that reveal an awareness of the explosive potential of their art, its capacity for radically transforming our ways of looking at ourselves and the worlds in which we live. Valiant and vulnerable all at once, poetry here is a construct that could well fit into what the youngest poet in this edition says of love: “Love is a nest made in the open”.
This edition also marks the entry of the nineteenth language into the PIW India domain. Telugu poetry is presented here for the first time. The voice is one of a veteran radical, Varavara Rao, a poet who (by his own description) “breathes among the masses”, a man recognised for his poetry of passion, outrage and sustained commitment.
Additionally, this edition presents the work of a noted English-language poet from India, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Mehrotra writes a poetry that is coded, symbolic and yet never abstruse. He also represents a credible and incisive voice in Indian literary criticism.
The third poet in this issue is a young writer in Hindi. Active as literary editor and critic, Giriraj Kiradoo is yet to publish a book, but his poetry has been published in journals and anthologies. That his poems find their way into this edition of PIW India owes as much to their playful self-awareness and almost matter-of-fact surrealism as to the acuity and precision of Rahul Soni’s translations.
Read on, stretch out a hand and receive a varied shower of what Kiradoo terms “falling metaphors”.
