Shadow Space.

Perry, John Oliver

Of this latest of Jayanta Mahapatra's twelve books of new poems in English (plus two sets of selections, plus four books of translations from Oriya and three recent books of poems in Oriya) it can readily be claimed, this is his strongest work, encompassing every facet of compelling feeling, every measure of meditative method, each hard-won understanding of self and world that has accrued since his two initial, relatively weak and derivative published appearances in 1971. On its coattails rides another singular achievement, the publication in the New Yorker's Indian English fiction issue (23 & 30 June 1997) of a new, relatively "available," somewhat descriptive poem, "Silence," that deftly and concretely avoids the cliches of thought and feeling in this persistent modernist theme/motif/situation. Since no other living Indian poet in English was selected (setting aside a modest poem by the young diaspora novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni), Mahapatra's widely established reputation as the finest multicultural poet working in India today is now especially a subject for jealous attacks, further honors, and solid substantiation.

To what specifiable characteristics, then, does this body of poetry owe its now secure superior position among discriminating readers worldwide? First off, I would note that, despite rare, but intelligent, evocations of persons, places, and objects from abroad, this poetry is not that of another diaspora Indian cosmopolite; it is undoubtedly and irrevocably from and of India, more specifically from "Living in Orissa," the first poem in this collection. Usually the settings implied, often by slight or fairly general hints, for the phenomenologically based meditations or for the more rarely presented scenes of recounted events can be found in and around the poet's hometown of Cuttack - its rivers, rains, trees, birds, its streets, people, and varied burdens of history and culture, including, of course, its poverty, oppressions of women and minorities, political failures. Not that Mahapatra's apparently private and unforced imaginative wanderings stray very often into social criticism. Yet there is a sense in which his thoughtful complaints about the passing of life, the vanities of time, illness, darkness, poetry writing, enact strong social or humanitarian, indeed humanistic, questionings; all the broader issues are integral to the immediate personal situation being probed and prodded for its life. Rather than being epistemological or metaphysical, much less overtly political in their concerns, these poems, in honest humility and self-doubt, refuse to seek definitive answers or focus blame.

Without being overtly "international," almost no concerns of an active, undetermined, and necessarily frustrated contemporary intelligence are entirely absent from Mahapatra's poetic attention. So the second most crucial point to make about his poetry is that its thoughtfulness never becomes prosaic. It almost never reaches for a current or common colloquial expression, yet, as poetry, it does not feel burdened by traditions, Indian, literary (e.g. Tagorean), or otherwise, though those burdens are occasional motifs ripe for comment. He does not, however, like so many other Indian English poets, complain of "the iron of English on my tongue" (R. Parthasarathy); the stresses in his poetic engagements with words quite evidently arise from the evanescence of experience and of shapely thinking. Which suggests a third characteristic of these poems: no matter how difficult of access some of the intense personal reactions and feelings may be, they are presented as concretely experiential poetry, not as abstract mental or verbal pursuits or in some cabalistic mythic mode. It is their dense imagining that certifies their poetic power for sustaining continued reencounters; and more than occasionally a fully satisfying reading requires our waiting, moving on from one mysterious phrase, passage, or poem to another. But that process is preferable to sifting through mediocrities in search of something worth pausing over, reconsidering, admitting to the mystery of unknowing, as this poet himself so frequently does, with anger, humility, disenchantment, awareness of failed innocence.

Thus, the ultimate value in this poetry that supports Mahapatra's superior worldwide evaluation is its ability to give pleasure with words, the supple strength of the frequently concatenated images, the weighty grace of phrasing, in single lines and extended passages, immanent with thoughts that occasionally break out into almost aphoristic statements we can treasure as poetically achieved understanding of ourselves and our world. Three examples, apropos of words merely "holding hands and telling stories": "Never before had I been near enough / the danger a word carried / to appreciate its monstrosity. / The sky is not my freedom of speech. / Only a police jeep cruises by, as in a film, / with the grinning officer waving at me. / Everyone in our street knows him; / there is nothing he can ever do wrong" (conclusion of "Heroism"); "Not in its mysterious face / do I see myself. Or see the lines move / in the palm of the hand. / Face obscure, / its feeble body keeps trembling / from the vain load it carries. // In the ashes / even the long fame of someone like Christ / hangs over the fable's edge. / The ashes seem a Calvary of ceremonies. / It has us trapped somewhere / between rites and understanding.// . . . // A man wanders around the ashes / and still doesn't move an inch. / Because it opens up / the terrible empty plain that lies before him. // Its gentle hand is on my back. / I close my eyes and take a deep breath. / And it has no face to it at all" (from "Ashes"); and finally, "A small part / of the present will always remember. / Friends, what is valuable today / is the luxury of speaking in a whisper. / One must not think to relive the lost life, / of the logic of existence / in either past or future. / Why wait for the earth and its sun / to fumble in a space of their own? / Forget answers, Star Wars, / the odours where you had lain, / and that something which moves / silently under your skin. / Now when I take your hand, / I cannot move any closer. / To wait for purpose / is to be devoid of meaning. / The child doesn't wait any more. / He leaves no tears / no tales or marks" ("The Waiting").

Whatever else poetry can and may do, such achievements by Mahapatra imprint his imaginative work irrevocably in the minds of readers who seek poetry that matters in and for their own living anywhere in our sharable world.

John Oliver Perry Seattle