Tag: The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock

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Review

Setting Traps for Light

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Setting Traps for Light

Author: Giti Chandra

Publisher: Hachette India

Setting Traps for Light is a debut collection of poems by Giti Chandra which is illuminated and irradiated by her unique and multifaceted artistry. She is a writer, poet, painter and musician. She is also an academic– in all quite a tall order. As is to be expected given her remarkable gifts, her writing is both luminous and beautiful.

In literary interviews hosted by cultural platforms like Platform Magazine, Chandra shared that the title originated from her hobby of using her mobile phone camera to capture how light hitting ordinary everyday objects completely transforms them. The title — Setting Traps for Light — acts as a luminous metaphor for discovering and working towards courage, hope, and resilience in the middle of personal grief, political trauma, and climate anxieties.

Many of these anxieties, of migration and change — climate and otherwise — are refracted obliquely through her poetry. Events that have been relegated to the background of consciousness, surface suddenly, often unexpectedly. Chandra’s verses often act as a prism, refracting the everyday, the mundane to bursts of sudden illumination. For instance, in ‘Ode to the Ordinary’, she celebrates the “unwashed  beauty of the Ordinary day, the unnoticed, unapplauded/ Transcience of the repetitively mundane/The ubiquitously profane/Say it now in romantic rhyme/The ordinary is the Skylark of our time.”

Here is an instance of turning the everyday into the sublime, elevating the quotidian, the seemingly trivial into a polished gem. In a beautiful illustration of the individual talent constructing and honing a poetic tradition, she expresses her gratitude to her poetic predecessors, interlacing their phrases into the fabric, the warp and the weft of her own poetry:

A month of poems ends
With a day dedicated to labour.
A month that began
With a day dedicated to Fools.
Therein lies, perhaps, a metaphor
Requiring another set of tools.

References to Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Shakespeare are strewn across the poem. Similarly, she alludes to Ghalib and Faiz, Ludhianvi and Mira who “solder and weld the self and creation.” She continues:

But of all the names and works of hands
Those of you, all banded here
Are closest to the bone. You stand 
Together and walk the way
From All Fools to Labour Day.

Replete with scriptural echoes, the poem becomes a poetic manifesto of sorts attesting to the hard work, the perspiration that is welded in the smithy of the poet’s soul and is then acknowledged and recognised as genius. By bringing in references to Yeats’s hammer and Eliot’s chisel, poetry is apprehended as something material that brings together both inspiration and perspiration. Fleeting moments are honed to enduring monuments alchemising the transcient and the evanescent into something more lasting and profound, something rich and strange.

The fact that Chandra is an artist par excellence is evident in the strong visual imagery and metaphors that inform her poetry. The fact that she is a trained musician is also expressed  in the mellifluous cadences of her verse, in the rise and fall of words, in the rhythms and segues of free and blank verse. The fact that she is an brilliant scholar /student with a keen and perceptive eye, is attested to by the evocative title of her first poetry collection, which has been a while in the making.

Even though she understands the temptations and potential risk of resorting to Romantic conceit, Chandra soldiers on to write her experiences of climate change and crisis, the unimaginable misery of the long walk home that characterised the movement of migrant labour in India in 2020 when the Covid crisis unfolded. The poet here becomes a witness, a chronicler of critical events as she poignantly narrates the death of a twelve-year-old boy. Elsewhere, she writes of the paradox and the “irony that we /Fight for air.” There is a reference to George Floyd who had a “knee on neck, face down/Grit on cheek, no breath to speak,/No bed to sleep on, etherised/In our castles, safe in locked/Towns.”  The use of the word “etherised” had been immortalised by T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Chandra has used it to suggest the numbness of contemporary civilisation in a state of crisis.

Chandra’s poetry opens up vast vistas and redefines the poet’s function-of playing witness, of chronicling change, treading oft-trod paths anew. Some poems also offer social commentary like ‘Simple Rhymes for Difficult Times’. In a series of apparently innocuous lines, the poet writes:

“Peace be in your streets/ Let no neighbour inspect/Your larder for its meats./Let no man  suspect/Your daughter of eyeing/Mates of other castes./Peace be in your markets/As people shop between fasts”. The reference leads inescapably to the current trends of food vigilantism. It evocatively explores loosening and binding, movement and migration, loss and desolation. A running theme is that of courage[1] , on which there are thematic and tonal variations.

In the poem ‘Love in the Time of Climate Change’, there are not only a Arnold’s poignant  lines from Dover Beach: “Ah love,let us be true /To one another,” but also echoes and resonances from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Contemporary anxieties and concerns meld with eternal verities and create a delectable smorgasbord of emotions: ‘‘Our love shall be a raft, fuelled /By no heat, in a world bent on burning. /Deserts and dry continents are no grounds/ For deserting. We shall find our feet/To a love of no returning.” The brilliance of these lines lie not just in the skillful use of enjambment and caesura, but the deft summing of the   lyrical tradition.

The central metaphor of “setting traps for light” acts as an active, deliberate pursuit of hope, beauty, and clarity. Instead of waiting for illumination to arrive passively, the poet argues that one must construct “traps”—through memory, art, and close observation—to capture fleeting moments of joy and truth. With her transnational themes and multiple and extended locations, Chandra’s poetry truly seems to inhabit a borderless world. 

The collection ends with a reminder that poetry is a commitment and an act of faith. In the penultimate poem, ‘When You Run Out of Words’: “Poets/ have said that you should speak/Because your lips, your tongue/Are free and the truth lives still.” Further, she insists that “all/Shall not be well/Till you are well.”

The brave new world of Chandra’s poetry involves integrity and truth telling. While musings on death and mutability are profoundly present in her debut collection of poems, the tone is not necessarily despairing. Somber and meditative, lyrical and reflective, the poems make us think, even as they transport us into a delightful realm and an enchanted forest of words.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

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Review

Contours of Him

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Contours of Him: Poems

Edited and Introduced by Malachi Edwin Vethamani

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

Contours of Him: Poems has been edited and introduced by Malachi Edwin Vethamani, a Malyasian academic of repute. The book has a rich assemblage of poetical voices — from both men and women — representing the contours and nuances of the many aspects and shades of masculinity. The poems explore the male body as a symbol of identity, art, and humanity, delving into themes of masculinity, strength, vulnerability, and beauty. It also examines the male body and psyche as the site of hurt and wounding. The book features poems that scrutinise the male form revealing or concealing it to explore these themes.

The focus on corporeality or the somatic coexists with the psychological in many poems in the anthology. Childhood innocence and curiosity coexist and yield to what could  be viewed as growing pains or  the challenges of maturation and understanding. There are several poems on the father-son theme, with poems  that express homage to the father. Christina Yin’s prose poem ‘To My Father’ and Gopal Lahiri’s ‘My Ideal Man’ are cases in point. Sudeep Sen in the poem, ‘Baba/Father’, captures the enormous vacuum left by the loss of the father as Sen completes the elaborate death rituals as the eldest son of his dead father, performed as per brahminical  prescriptions. In a gnomic and nuanced vein, Vethamani , the editor of the anthology, gives his take on father-son  intimacies. 

This book examines the contours of the male body and psyche at different stages of life and could be viewed as a psycho-somatic exploration of masculinity across diverse cultures. It also explores the strength and fragility of the male physique, occasionally dipping into cultural repertoires of  male archetypes, human and divine. At the same time, it acknowledges societal expectations from men and their concomitant cultural insecurities, particularly regarding their identity and the search for acceptance.

A common motif in many of the poems is about the unwitting and unwillingly borne burden and baggage of masculinity. The protagonists/personae of many of these poems seem to be conscious that masculinity is but a performance, involving the display of muscles and embodying a certain swag. Yet this definition of and  expectation from men within patriarchies, can be a cage and  straitjacket which binds, restricts and confines the human being. If patriarchies bind women, men are not exempt from it either. It is this theme that resonates(among others) in Angshuman Kar’s poem called ‘Tears’: “When mountains cry, rivers are born/From a woman’s tears, pearls have always been born/And when mothers cry, dormant volcanoes awaken…No one in the world knows/why a strong man cries/or why, when he does/he looks so sacred and beautiful.” 

The predominant focus, however, is on corporeality that has led to the exploration of its many aspects of the  body in the poems. The many facets locates the male body along a spectrum of materiality, vulnerability, relationality and the transcendental possibilities of the body. In recent years, there have been a plethora of poems by women discussing corporeality in multiple registers, exploring female subjectivity, desire and sexuality. Focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the gendered body has led to numerous explorations and analyses of femininity, on being/becoming women, on trans-identities. Many poems have been written on the human-divine aspect of the female body. Kamala Das and others (including Pakistani women poets) have written evocatively about the transgressive desires and  the many hungers of the female body .

Voices from the global south recording the voices of men was perhaps the need of the moment. The anthology includes a few poems on masculinity as a construct, especially focusing on the male body through various lenses — vulnerability, performance, shame, violence, and transformation. These poems offer a critical lens rather than idealising masculinity, exposing its social constructions and internal contradictions. They also highlight the relational nature of masculinity which are often traditionally embedded within family structures in South Asia. There are glimpses of guilt in Arthur Neong’s poem, “At this juncture of age, I feel like a teenager again,” where the persona/speaker seems keen to shed and slough off the burdens of masculinity and be in an escapist mode. He writes “At times I go to my wife for a little reprieve/Yet eyes open, think of ways to cheat”. Some of the poems read like love poems, like David C.E. Tneh’s poem, ‘Crossings’, that memorialises his dead friend. Tneh writes: “between the shared spaces and/ private moments come a synergy of collective memories/that I have  of you.”

 A writer writing on the  female body once referred to it as  a story discussed by men. Similarly, the anthology at hand discusses the contours of male corporeality and affect. The anxieties of masculinity, of literally not measuring up, pepper these poems and forms one of the vital themes of this anthology. Occasionally, a kind of narcissism creeps in, often giving way to musing or self-introspection. After voicing the common masculine concerns(and anxieties) of corporeal self-consciousness, the poet Kiriti Sengupta declares:

“I don’t look at veiled people anymore. 
It is either my age or my hormones.
I now look beyond the flesh, bone and keratin.”

In the last revelatory line, there is a movement towards transcendence: “I have been told /the finer body dwells undressed.”

In a different context but similar vein, Sandeep Kumar Mishra in ‘The Canvas of Form’ writes, “The naked body, stripped of all pretence,/Breathes honesty, raw beauty, fragile strength.” The profundity of the closing lines is inescapable: “The body, bared, is neither shame nor pride/But speaks of histories, of fears ,of love. It tells  of burdens carried, joys embraced/And in its stillness, whispers human truth.”

Much canonical poetry, including that of the famed  icon of modernist poetry, T.S.Eliot, writing a century ago, display a preoccupation with masculine anxieties in his iconic ‘The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock’. The effete personae/protagonist , immortalised in the eponymous poem, Felix Cheong writes of ‘Middling Age’ that it’s “So unbecoming to have become so old? You’d sooner wear the ends of your frailty rolled”, lines echoing   T.S.Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock, “I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

From Justin Baldoni’s Man Enough to Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, there are many coming of age stories  in our cultural landscape-on book lists and bestseller lists. While the sociology of sex and gender has long been a part of sociology and social psychology, the growth and development of a field of knowledge –gender studies– in the last four decades or so, has thrown into relief the fact that if femininity is a construct, so is masculinity.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

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Review

A Cup that Cheers: Savouring The Coffee Rubaiyat

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: The Coffee Rubaiyat

Author: Rhys Hughes

Publisher: Alien Buddha Press

 Rhys Hughes’ creative adaptation of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam[1] is a delightful read. Located somewhere between tribute and parody, it has recreated the tonal and prosodic rhythms of the original translation, quartet by quartet. Yet, there is a thin line between parody and subversion, and Hughes’s adaptation negotiates this with a tongue-in cheek flippancy.

To illustrate the close parallel of the original 1st quartrain of Fitzgerald’s translation and Hughes creative adaptation:

Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

The original aubade is wittily recast as:  

Awake! For the alarm clock next to the bed

Is ringing the bells that can wake the dead:

And Lo! The ruby rays of the rising sun

Colour the espresso machine a pinkish red.

This paean to coffee is replete with personifications –“Dawn’s lips are coffee-smeared”(vi).

Some of Hughes odes to coffee poke fun at the metropolis and its quirky inhabitants, the poem(s) capture the rhythms of life and its frenetic pace in the urban metropolis. Thus in quatrain 18, we get a glimpse, a veritable word-picture of the tube/metro train commuter:

I sometimes think that never blows so hard,

The commuter who is late, reputation marred,

To cool his coffee so he can catch his train

Before all the doors are closed by the guard.

Literary- and other-Histories of Coffee

In a ‘Brief History of Coffee around the World’, Garrett Oden clarifies that , unlike tea and alcohol which have been around and in use for more than five thousand years, coffee has had a relatively recent history. Although it has supposedly been around for over a 1000 years, its first verifiable documented use was about 500 years ago. Accidentally discovered by a goat herder whose goats turned unusually frisky after consuming some red beans, it became popular in Yemen and the areas surrounding it, the area  we know now as the Middle East or as west Asia. The journey of coffee to Europe and beyond is replete with narratives of colonialism, plunder, pillage and scandal. This murky history was often forgotten as  the roasted magic bean  became a rage in coffee houses across the world.

The dubious antecedents of this heady brew derived from the magic bean is invoked in literary works such as Alexander Pope’s  ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where the effects of coffee are thus described:

“Coffee, (which makes the Politicians wise, And see thro’ all things with his half-shut eyes)/Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s brain new stratagems” to fulfil  his nefarious designs. Closer to our own times, we have T.S. Eliot’s line in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ where his persona declares, summing up the urban ennui of his quotidian existence, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, a line which is yet another testimony to the fact that coffee has become  an inseparable and indispensable part of our everyday life.

Echoes of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat are interwoven into each quatrain and the poems follow the chronology of the original sequence. From the chess board (p 56-XLVIX) to the image of the “moving finger” which is replaced by the “moving tongue” (LI, p58), in poem after poem, we have many hyperboles to capture the effects of this drink which stands for a way of life. It is a way of life familiar to inhabitants of the modern metropolis where one’s life is lived under the glare of neon lights, and where sleeplessness, stress are all par for the course.  

Although the poems employs the resources of several figures of speech like metaphor, personification, hyperbole, perhaps the most apt and commonly used figure is that of bathos. It is an effect of anticlimax created by a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial. A typical example is Pope’s line in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where he says, “Great Anna, whom three realms obey/ Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea”: In Hughes’s case, “the cosmos is nothing but a frappucino” ,”the inverted cup we call the sky.”

The poems are crafted in a spirit of irreverent good humour and this  book is definitely a  little nugget, worth savouring. Even if (to persist in the metaphor) one’s cup does not run over, it is definitely a cup that cheers.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Coffee Rubaiyat

[1] The translation was first published in 1859. Omar Khayyam, an astronaut, mathematician, a philosopher and a poet lived from 1048–1131 and wrote in Persian.

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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International