Woolgathering.

Perry, John Oliver

Shiv K. Kumar. Woolgathering. New Delhi. Disha/Orient Longman. 1998. 75 pages. Rs60. ISBN 81-250-1549-3.

This new volume of poems from a poet well known in the last generation (b. 1921) may raise questions about their provenance. Shiv Kumar's last book, for which he received the Sahitya Akademi award, was Trapfalls in the Sky (1986), and the prior one, Subterfuges, appeared during a flurry of Oxford University Press productions in the mid-1970s and is the best known. During the eighties and early nineties, Kumar, long a higher university administrator, wrote lively, often ironic, occasionally sharply critical accounts of the poetry scene for the Sunday press. And all along he has been turning out an occasional poem; sixty, most of them a single page in length, are collected in Woolgathering to memorialize, as a major thread, his inevitable thoughts about death and dying: "Now it may happen any time" ("Shadow Lines").

The initial offering is "On Listening to Mozart's 'Requiem'," closely followed by "Crematorium at Adikmet, Hyderabad" and "The Death of My Father." His mother's death "three winters ago" marks "Dawnbreak over Khasi Hills." Sometimes the end is presented as mere and sheer darkness, the freezing of all movement ("Lodi Tombs"), "a leap into the void" ("Night"), sleep ("Afternoon"), sometimes with a flicker of hope for peace, a return home or rebirth ("Pavement Sleepers of Bombay," "Sunrise"), some answers ("After the Rain"). And there is this conclusion to "Golconda Fort": "some dreams . . . recycle / themselves eternally / because love forges its own scriptures / to defy time's scoffing." The positive hope ending "Forgetfulness"-"How else can you sail lightly / across the dark river / to the tree which will leaf eternally"-is less convincing.

Kumar has the usual concerns that the going ("End of the Party") be at a good time and place ("Banaras: Winter Morning," "Night"), despite contrary fears ("Rape"). A few poems deal with his fading life's continuing frustrations, with law courts ("I Say It on Oath, Your Lordship," "Farewell to Tis Hazari Courts, Delhi"), with technology ("The Computer"), with "marital rancour" ("Bedroom," "Twenty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary"), and, as we have come to expect from this poet, with unrequited or unresolvable lust ("Drizzle," "Khajuraho," "Walking Through the Woods," "To a Beautiful Young Woman Aspiring to Be a Poet," "Even at My Age," "Lolita").

Coming to this volume from a reading of the twenty-fifth-anniversary issue of the American Poetry Review, which includes an alphabet of notable poets from the older generation-Ammons, Ashbery, Levertov, Merwin, et alia-to Jane Miller and Sharon Olds, I find it difficult to give Shiv Kumar high marks for his materials, his manner, his meanings, equal to or less than the ordinary run of APR poets. The tenth- anniversary issue of Kavya Bharati (published at SCILET, American College, Madurai) includes new works by Jayanta Mahapatra and Keki Daruwalla which surpass these, but the younger poets are scarcely Kumar's equal, mostly less estimable.

Kumar's poems are given to ready symbol and metonymy and to occasional puns: e.g., "the wind . . . making sweeping statements on the beach" in "Woolgathering" itself, where "the breakers only wanted / to caution me against reading / too much into mere sounds" and "I know it's only my mind sending out / skiffs down my blood-stream / to scout for salmon." There is an evident ease in Kumar's manner and confidence in his tone, elegiac as it mainly is here. His thinking never falls into banality, but I did not find it rising into revelation. So the whole does not impress me as sufficiently suggestive to be memorable, despite the jacket claim: "a major poet writing in India today." Worthy of inclusion among competent Indian poets of his generation, no doubt-for there were many of that mostly bygone time who embarrassed by their triteness, their derivativeness, their clumsy use of Indian English, their ignorance of musicality, their prosaic flatness. So, if you are in search of some sensible confrontations with death and dying, avoiding panic, high passion, or an irritatingly driven desire for transcendence, Woolgathering can fulfill those needs, perhaps not very generously but with a good compass of thoughtfully composed poems.

John Oliver Perry

Seattle/Paris