Book Review by Basudhara Roy
Title: A City Full of Sirens
Author: Sanket Mhatre
Publishers: Hawakal Publishers
I wait weighing words against memories memories against poetry poetry against noise noise against feeling feeling against time only to arrive at the deepest homecoming of words - ‘Homecoming’
Something irreplaceably urgent yet inconsolably fragile commands the readers’ attention in Sanket Mhatre’s A City Full of Sirens. There is, to begin with, the orderly chaos of the book cover that with its startling depiction of noise and alarm, summons us to a danger that is as neurological as it is existential, as concretely physical as it is metaphysical, and as identifiable as it is, ultimately, anonymous.
Darkness asphyxiates shifting the axis of your soul madness froths bubbles of hurt shadows of shards inserting lost files of remembrance pulse rising – raising a question at boiling point
Here is an understanding of the city as both protagonist and witness, as conquistador and vanquished, as healer and diseased. Mhatre is mostly talking about Mumbai (“Andheri East doesn’t realize/ that it is sleeping in a belly of void/ It is only a matter of time/ until all the lights go out”) but his city could be “the broken arteries of Kolkata” (‘Mid-flight’) or precisely any cityscape where life routinely unravels amidst disillusionment, betrayal, threat and hope, every poem to it being “a wound or a flower or a piece of sunshine” “written on the threshold of vulnerability and despair” as “a letter trying to find its own footprint on the shifting axis of time and circumstance” (‘Introduction’)
Tortuous and tortured, Mhatre’s city is a site of bereavement, uncertainty, imperilment, disease, derangement and more, its inhabitants choiceless in their compulsion to wear its frayed fabric upon their skin. But this is not all. Lurking within these poems is also the decisive realisation of the city as a human construct, a mirror that reflects rather than distorts or imposes human irresponsibility and disorder. In the title poem of the collection, for instance, the city is a patient incapable of being saved by its nonchalant dwellers:
the city has been suddenly diagnosed with Stage 3C and all of us who matter to her: slum dwellers, middle class, uber rich upper caste, sub-middle-sub-lower, lower, converts, casteless, outcasts, pimps and city planners were late by a minimum of ten months in pre-empting this disease
Mhatre’s cities emit steady sirens of disaster – biological, ecological, technological, moral and aesthetic. But redemption, too, is to be found here alone (“Clay hands in a relentless prayer to -/ everything the earth stands for/ and everything that rises upwards from it.” – ‘A Kiss of Cotton’) for only what hurts has the ability to effectively transform – “anything that doesn’t change our body can never change us”. (‘Culture of Transience’) What, chiefly, reconciles the city as wound to the city as mirror, is the imperative of language and its expressive potential for love and poetry. (“A verse could be an open road” – ‘These Years with Her’)
A City Full of Sirens is a dense interrogation of the city, its sirens of overpopulation, congestion, capitalism and climate change, and an exploration of the fullness or plenitude of language that can somehow soften all of this and make it more bearable for life and time. Firmly rooting this collection is a momentous faith in the capacity of words to resist postmodern fragmentation by building bridges across emotions, cultures, and epistemologies. Mhatre’s imagination in poetry is luxuriantly metaphorical. In almost every poem, words defy ordinary appearances to transform into winged images in deep conversation with a reality tangential to the page. In ‘Anuvaad[1]’, as the poet says, all languages are born “from the same birdsong”. In ‘The Concept of Distance’, every stanza offers a new perspective into distance – “The space of pain between two alphabets, now divorced,/ looking on either side of a sentence”. In ‘Morphing into Everything’, the beloved and the city coalesce into one:
my fortresses crumble dissolve mid-sea rebirth as an archipelago sink into her navel populate her mind germinate on her dermis disintegrate into a thousand birds taking early flight
In each of the fifty-six poems in the collection, is a seamless interweaving of self and space. Most of Mhatre’s sirens are symbolic, conjured through the weight and immediacy of metaphor. In each poem is this sense of something that must be overcome — a lurking claustrophobia, an unnamed distrust, a haunting faithlessness, a constant suggestion of order tipping into anarchy.
An acute precariousness, marked by a vital need to thresh out feeling on the floor of language, is the signature of this collection.
Very significantly, many of these poems are about poetry itself — its genesis, composition, structure, and its relentless shapeshifting ability to weld disparate worlds and subjectivities into a coherent experiential whole. Unravelling within this book’s narrative arc is an empathetic journey of the body and spirit, its goal being to discover “the completeness of existence…Time. Tide. Man. Woman. Humanity. Age. Difference. Distance”. (‘Rain Being’) Passion configures these poems in various ways and not least through the erotic of language. In the best poems here, love, poetry, woman and city become indistinguishable from one another, permeating ontological and aesthetic boundaries and accomplishing a spiritual surrealism that marks the distinctness of this collection.
A City Full of Sirens is, thus, about cities that are both germane and antithetical to poetry, about a “confabulated planet” and mutating geographies “stretching/ through thick mesh of bones and arteries/ pulp synchronized to our heartbeats/ birdsong to a breath/ while ink sprawls/ on a dream of half-slept pages”. (‘Vertical Forests’) It is equally about the inhabitants of the cityscape, the reconciliation of their numerous fragments and roles – “a new you added everyday/ an old you subtracted”. (‘The Queue’), intending “to geolocate/ the fulcrum of our absolute feeling/ outliving erasures”. (‘Synthesis’)
The collection remains remarkable for its obsession with language, its authentic emotional inflections, its charged candour, and its oscillations across a wide thematic range of existence, estrangement, erosion, and redemption. Annihilation, disease and death watermark these poems in undeniable ways but the energy of the book lies in its refusal to be contained within scripts of hopelessness or pain. Summoning optimism to thought and agency to action, A City Full of Sirens makes a palliative of poetry and crafts an entourage of life’s resilience to learn from every setback –
I was never the rain. Until you cloud-burst me with words. You gave me the first drop. It’s my turn to take you in. --‘Rain Being’
Click here to read the excerpt
[1] Translation, Hindi
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.
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