 The Poetry Chain Gopi Kottoor E50/1 Reserve Bank of India Staff Quarters Raintree Marg CBD Belapur New Bombay - 600614 India Subscriptions: Rs 100 pa; Rs 500, 10 years. email Poetry Chain read reviews of earlier issues Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page Home page Notes for publishers Want to be a reviewer? Anthologies. Books. Audio. Magazines. Software. Video. Artefacts. Web design by Gerald England This page last updated: 13th May 2004. |
The Poetry Chain Vol.10 #4 | |
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I find this is a tricky magazine to review for reasons and in ways I shall try to spell out later. It is in its sixth year of existence, is produced in Mumbai, India, and its editor and contributors appear to be largely, if not exclusively, Indian, and resident on the sub-continent. It has the appearance and constitution of a conventional British magazine (i.e. editorial, competition, list of books received — though no review section). The problems of the reviewer are these: if the contents are treated in the same way and to the same standard as those of a British magazine, it is easy to find faults (with the quality of the English — though I hasten to add at the outset that this is fairly uniformly good: even this is a problematic statement, as my next point will suggest); if "allowances are made", for no matter what intentionally-worthwhile reasons, the reviewer runs the risk of seeming to be patronising. I am mindful of the probable fact that the contributors are writing in, at most, so to speak, their second language. Judged dispassionately and by the strictest standards, not many of these poems come through the test unscathed; on the other hand, bearing in mind that these writers are writing in, as I suppose, a foreign language to all intents and purposes (in spite of the legacy, if that's what it is, of the Raj), the level of literacy is very high. (See what I meant by the risk of seeming to patronise?) I don't know how many of the contributors have been through an Eng. Lit. mill, but clearly some have; K. Chandrasekharan's STASIS begins: Bye-bye, sweet friends, Now it is bed time even in Byzantium Having stasis in artifices; Call it block, dejection ode Or crudest month...Yeats, Eliot and Coleridge putting in appearances there (and the linguistic congestion of the third line is a feature of several other poems). But most of the poems have more successfully assimilated their sources, even if most of them seem like translations, expressions at one remove from reality, rather than written on the pulse. Sivakami Velliangiri's VILLAGE BEAUTIES is in this regard exceptional: The nubile girls of the metropolis Slip out silently Without appa's knowledge To the green tattoo makers — man and wife Who are waiting with this decoction Of lamp soot and breast milk...Something authentic there (and how neatly disdainful is "decoction"); and whilst these writers are under no obligation to entertain an itinerant reviewer by breathing a spirit of place into their work, I have to say that much of the time what is depicted could be happening anywhere (which adds to the feeling that many of these poems are disembodied literary exercises). Some of the following sample, from Prabhanjan K. Mishra's EXCAVATORS, is a not-untypical mixture of getting it right and getting it, in various ways, quite wrong: ...The mansions get dismantled, pebbles grow into rockgardens. In seismic adjustments shapes change, identities evaporate. The excavators continue, untiring and curious. Caves and monuments wait in comatose dark...This sample from Swapank Banerjee's FETTERS fails as so many poems fail (in whatever language) to be more than vague fishing in the fathomless seas of the ineffable: Suddenly a heart-squeezed-dry torment sufaces from the deeps bringing to the fore the ever-alive moments of absolute frailty.But, and when all my reviewer's ifs and buts have had their say, I have no doubt about the overall validity of the exercise of magazines such as this; as C.S. Shah's SHORT POEM puts it: Words — an escape route for fugitive silence....Quite so. And as an afterword by, I assume, the editor, Gopi Krishnan Kottoor, puts it: The writing of a poem is to a poet his duty unto himself. Let each poet perform his duty. The writing is its own reward.How this squares with the publication of magazines such as this one is a can of worms this reviewer suggests we leave for the time being firmly closed! | ||
| reviewer: Eddie Wainwright. |