Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume II | Issue 3
Spring: time of festivals for the earth’s fecundity, for viewing gardens, noting transformations. A time for looking forward and looking back with wonder: we are still standing! In this issue we present a selection of wonderful poems by Adil Jussawalla, Hijab Imtiaz Ali translated by Aamer Hussein and Todd Swift.
Adil Jussawalla is a key figure in post-independence Indian poetry. He’s a poet, chronicler and critic, editor of stimulating book review pages in magazines, columnist and one of the founders of the legendary Clearing House poets’ publishing cooperative set up in the mid-70s. His teaching and presence has changed the careers of many, including mine. From his selected prose Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments edited by novelist and poet Jerry Pinto we find this: “It is usual to say that writing is a way of making sense of the shrapnel of data.” And here lies a paradox of sorts: Jussawalla is an abundantly published writer of prose; as a poet he has four volumes, each of the first three followed by a hiatus of over a decade. But each of his collections has been a cause for celebration. His voice is sharp, intimate and disturbing as it fearlessly ranges across forms; its melancholic tone shooting out of his struggle to keep faith in humanity and compassion. The poems startle with their wily syntax, the pounding musicality of rhythms — and no material or incident is, for him, beyond reflection. In this selection we present the stunning verse narrative Chakravyuha (War) written for a TV production of Ratan Thiyam’s play, commissioned by Channel 4. The play was telecast on 16 May 1989, and a video recording of it was shown on two separate occasions at Mumbai’s Little Theatre, NCPA. And two rare new poems, Turning Seventy and The Garden’s Earth Yawns which end with these mysterious and gracious lines “There are days/ when every living thing in the garden/ breathes with its earth.” Reading Adil Jussawalla makes one holds one’s breath.
Pakistani writer Hijab Ismail who caught the public’s attention in 1932 with the publication of three Urdu novellas entitled Meri natamam muhabbat (My Unfinished Love) inhabits the realm of the prose poem, especially in celebrated short story writer and novelist Aamer Hussein’s dreamy and superb translations. In his elegant introduction he comments, “Hijab broke new ground in setting her tragic and sometimes Gothic love stories in imaginary landscapes at times reminiscent of the Eastern Mediterranean and at others of South India, where she grew up; exotic backdrops often served to disguise her subversive intent, which was to chart the lives of educated, privileged Indian Muslim women whose destinies were circumscribed by the rigid rules of class and clan.” Further, he writes that while translating her work he was reminded of their similarity to Mughal and Pahari miniatures. “… Nowhere is this technique more compelling than in the texts that employ a modicum of linear narration, where elliptical transitions of space… or time… reflect the shifting emotions of the first person narrator, and remind the reader of a sequence of miniatures… in which we see the same character in different places at different times of day.” Here is an enchanting excerpt that illumines detail and vastness in equal measure. “Hot days, luminous like a poet’s dream, warm as musk./ On such days, it seems, light’s born: it pours from cerulean skies, bathes wood, rock, water. On hot days the sun shines down on hares that dance beneath the trees./ Look, my friend: a single star up there in the sky gleams/ like light reflected in a fawn’s eye. The sun’s last rays slide off birds’ bright wings, like snowflakes melting./ Hot days: ripples in a river of light.”
Todd Swift is respected around the world, not only for his anthologies, such as 100 Poets Against the War, or for his blog Eyewear, read by over one million people since 2005, or his work as Oxfam GB’s poet-in-residence 2004-2012; he’s also known for promoting poetry on various platforms. Prolific, with eight collections and many pamphlets behind him, his Selected Poems is forthcoming in autumn. Poetry London describes him as a “fusion poet”, with his writing encompassing a cross-over aesthetic of experimental and traditional forms, and low and high culture. His ambition, he claims, is “to combine the confessionalism of the Alvarez era with the modernist panache of the Forties poets” he admires such as Nicholas Moore, FT Prince and Joan Murray. He also cites Ezra Pound and Orson Welles as key influences. In 2010 he converted to Catholicism and speaks of his self-professed “wary idealism” that glimmers through his poems whose recurrent themes are childhood traumas, cinema, faith, Freudian analysis, marriage, travel, nostalgia, violence, flamboyance, death and sexual desire. Above all Todd Swift’s poems confirm the human heart’s wonderful resilience, and the varied tones of love. Here’s the poignant ending of In Memoriam, Seamus Heaney: “Only bodies halt, and that is a bitterness/ to drink down. Sweet hearts fail. Words go far.” And this excerpt from Unfinished Study of a French Girl was born out of contemplating a Whistler painting in a museum at University of Glasgow where he teaches. “it’s only air where art/ could have been; the stroke/ of seconds that slip between what is night, and what/ might be a dream…”
As the year turns, perhaps we ask what dreams did we pursue, have they changed as spring’s efflorescence returns; is a work of art ever complete, is a reading ever final…
Priya