Modern Literature

Tag: Keki N Daruwalla

  • Landfall – Poems – Keki N. Daruwalla

    Landfall – Poems – Keki N. Daruwalla

     

     

    Book Review by Anjana Basu

     

    Heresy of Verse

    Keki Daruwalla continues to be prolific with his poetry, with his roots firmly planted in the past. Landfall follows the pathway laid out by Dante for inspiration, down a thin thread of history and illumination. Though yes, the reference is to Canto X which talks about that section of hell reserved for heretics who did not believe in the soul’s existence and searched for happiness

    Landfall is what ships do when breasting waves to break on foreign shores. It is also what cyclones do, the voyaging winds that travel from place to place spiralling around a still centre possibly another kind of hell. There is a sense of breaking ground after long voyaging to the title which bears fruit in the poems that follow in Daruwalla’s 11th volume after his first book came out in 1970.

    Having explored history in his novels – Pepper and Salt For Christ, for example – Daruwalla continues to explore the past and its bearings on the present. The cover of ‘Landfall’ uses a detail from a Delacroix painting Dante and Virgil in Hell that flags the predominant references in  this book.  Of course, one has to be familiar with the context.

    The problem with both history and mythology, is that unless the reader is familiar with Daruwalla’s references, he is forced to pause in his reading, leaf through whatever references he can find and then return to the poetry. However, he is welcome to sit back and enjoy the rhythm and the internal word play that Daruwalla does so effectively.

    Though a formal poet, Daruwalla attempts a break with structure in Notes on a Sanctuary which is prose poetry and part of his Alaska section.  

    But your good days are over. You are as vulnerable as Parsis, thinning away despite your talons and  those low-flying speed-bursts as you go after songbirds

    The reference to Daruwalla’s own community breaks the expected format of the verse though Parsis are as endangered as snow hares.

    Predator and prey rise together. How does the lynx know that  this is a good snow-hare year, six hundred per square mile?

    Landfall was written over the past five years which included the Covid times. The Sonnets on the Black Death will resonate with a world swept by the apocalypse of a dread virus, citing the summons from the King of Byzantium whose son has been struck down and followed by the parades of deaths and accusations all of which time has not changed.

    The summons were from the Byzantium court,
    he was wanted there, the king’s son was dead,
    the advance guard of buboes had got to him.

    The plague is creeping across the known civilised world and the reactions were the same then as they were during Covid

    Reports from the sea crowd my dreams, winds seethe with salt and fear; this could have been a jest
    in the old days, a threat from rat and flea, but now this line of rodents, themselves fleeing the pest

    The Night Attendant series, five poems near  the end of the book more directly call up the pandemic year for the reader.

    Daruwalla continues to be political in poems like Hathras and others, linking to the state of the nation as it is today without the cover of mythology. He writes about the hypocritical political-religious falsehood propaganda of the current day, unflinching in his confrontation of what he perceives to be the truth of today’s India.

    UP is not the right home for daughter/Whether India is a better place/we can discuss later  

    His poems open windows and doors to other spaces and other countries – Cyprus, Alaska and more, calling up a rush of memories. Many of Daruwalla’s poems are set out of India, even though Alaska is largely an admiration of natural life and climate.

    Daruwalla is an acute observer of both the human psyche and the natural world, and he does celebrate the times when people and nature come together in quietude. Many of the poems in this collection reflect the poet’s wonder at nature and at how we manage to live such brief lives ignorant of the infinite space that surrounds us.

     How does a fitful glimmer/move into memory through words?

    The question is, is there anything called ageism in poetry? Daruwalla is in his mid-eighties but there is no strain or stretch in his poetic voice. Nor should there be – his work remains fresh and lively, using mythology to examine the present while praising the strength of nature, animals, and the importance of history.

     

    (Excerpt from the book)

    Night Fishing

    The night still, the boat unmoving and a call from a far-off rock as if from another sea; the line drops like the first look of love, not stirring the water, or perhaps stirring it. Is night a hermit, he thinks. Wet breeze and thought trouble the old man, and the catch—fish intricately mottled, belly a sliver of palpitating silver; thought troubles him, coral and molluscs static under a heaving sea, but his sea is not heaving, it is not frothing on the beach but kissing it, it is still, he thinks of the sea-floor, fish moving over shell and sand, and the mangrove forest guarding the coast, and he compares mangrove with the brain, mangrove as memory, sea as life sloshing around it, and slowly the head drops into a dream and the tremor on the line pulses away and he doesn’t notice.

     

    (Landfall : Poems – By Keki N. Daruwalla – Speaking Tiger – INR 499 )

    About the Reviewer

    Anjana Basu is a noted novelist, poet, reviewer and travel writer.

     

     

  • Naishapur and Babylon – By Keki N. Daruwalla

    Naishapur and Babylon – By Keki N. Daruwalla

     

    Review by Anjana Basu

    Despite the Machine Guns

    The warped image of a kingfisher in the water – at least it is a bird, at least there is water. Keki Daruwalla once confessed that in these times only politics can force him into poetry. In 2014, he gave up his Sahitya Akademi award(1) as a protest against right wing fundamentalism that led to the death of the scholar MM Kalburgi. His poems now lament a splintered world where the bird is a fragmented image of something that was once whole.

    Daruwalla takes his title from Omar Khayyam and puts together a collection of reflections on mortality, and marginalization taking his contrast point from Greek prophets like Tiresias or the quotidian Naropa who heard bird calls by never the call of the soul. Against this is set the  troubles in modern Iraq and the problems of women left behind by the husband’s pursuing higher aims – even though the example again is that of Naropa, Daruwalla points out that words like dharma are now ‘dangerous’ because the world has made them so.

    What was before just a season has possibly become a season of decay that has to be exposed and Daruwalla feels that the only way to do it is by evoking the past and its mores. The collection spans the vast universe of his library covering fallen kingdoms of Egypt and ancient Persia, not to mention references to Pasternak through Doctor Zhivago, the wolves baying in the Siberian winter outside the candlelit house of love. Recollections of TS Eliot are inescapable – not just in the evoking of Tiresias but in the themes of grief, loss and death.

    Daruwalla always remembers that the wolves are at the gate. The question is how does one fight a world in which the predators are growing and trigger-happy goons are toting machine guns while ambulances scream? For the poet the only refuge is imagination but that too for how long? Through the twists and turns of history and the passing of its tyrants, poets and artists have sought the same pathway to try to make sense of what seems senseless. Ultimately nothing is but what it is not.

    Birds and their flight patterns proliferate; in fact Daruwalla’s favourite images are those of birds, the blue jay, the eagle, the kingfisher and the falcon. They bring messages from heaven to earth, protest at Tiresias’ alteration of an omen and to Daruwalla verse is like the freewheeling flight of the falcon. Typically he prefers the beak and talon kind of bird rather than the gentle ones – the birds in this book are raptors for the most part which compete with the violence around them. Even though  Naishapur and Babylon was put together without any particular theme in mind, the ones chosen are muscular in message and it is Daruwalla’s preoccupations that dominate no matter the time frame in which they were written. This is a dangerous world we live in where everyone grasps at fragments of the truth and the grudging realisation of age and frailty is beginning to creep in as the wind whets its razor against the rocks and the metaphors make their mark on the mind of the reader.

    Here is a poem from the collection:

    Dreams

    Throughout my dreams

    I am at different places,

    seldom at home; but often

    even when the place is strange

    I think it is home.

    Time and place get mingled—

    the year may be a stranger

    but I feel that we have met.

    Then time switches on its

    soul-conditioning plant

    and I feel the draft;

    it switches on its shadow-light,

    I don’t spot the borderline

    between eras, yet I can sense

    the rain of the past drumming

    on the roof-tiles of the present.

    Footnote:

    (1) – The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honor in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit.

     

    Book Details:

    Naishapur and Babylon – By Keki N. Daruwalla

    Published by: Speaking Tiger Books (http://speakingtigerbooks.com/books/naishapur-and-babylon/)

    About the poet/author & the reviewer :

    Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India’s foremost poets and writers. His ten volumes of poetry include Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead (winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, 1984), Landscapes (winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Award, Asia, 1987), Night River and The Map-maker. His first novel, For Pepper and Christ, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2010. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014. Most recently, he was honoured with the Poet Laureate award at the Tata Literature Live! Mumbai Litfest, 2017. His work has been translated into Spanish, Swedish, Magyar, German and Russian.

    Anjana Basu works as an advertising consultant in Calcutta. Apart from seven novels to her credit, she has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India; the BBC has broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. She has appeared in The Antigonish Review. The Edinburgh Review and The Saltzburg Review have also featured her work.