Caught in a Stampede.

Perry, John Oliver

Keki Daruwalla, himself eminent both as poet and as police official (now retired), quite naturally was asked to introduce this first volume by a young woman police officer in Hyderabad, also from a minority community, not Parsi but Sikh. He also quite rightly seeks out a few striking figures that work - like watching from an airplane "clouds buffalo below" - and a couple of well-mined situations, then briefly complains of the "unorthodox manner" in which "Tejdeep handles language," adding that "restraint and craft" may be expected to emerge "by and by." Tactfully, he does not comment on, but surely deplored, the publisher's foolish use of a square format and awkward typography together with simpleminded illustrations to enhance (the inevitable word) these sixty-nine mostly down-to-earth poems.

Tejdeep's evident strength lies in combining immensely fertile imagery with an intimate candor challenging especially sexually repressive convention while avoiding crassly confessional exhibitionism. Unfortunately, the candor can slide into archness or forced emotionalizing in deference to a justifiable anger, the stunning imagery into mundane inanities when closely observed domestic details fail to resonate, and all too often the voice, rather than forceful or at least personal, falls into poeticizings or flat generalities. Occasionally, the poems turn on or conclude with a fine fury; at times, however, the movement or structure seems awkward, directionless, inadequately thought through, simply arbitrary. And everywhere clumsy syntactic constructions, even archaic inversions, are in danger of impacting harshly imprecise language that mimics a large mind with a wide vocabulary and experience. Tejdeep's work answers to the need for Indian English poetry to break out of its narrow conventions of language and feeling, but perhaps too precipitously.

Representative of Tejdeep's problems are three consecutive stanzas from the middle of "At the Firing Range": "The vacuum cleaner / at work, / sucking the venom, frustration / and platitudes / into an invisible garbage heap. //Woman, the drip irrigated / home maker, / the last to reap, / the first to yield, / to the law breaker. // She a firing range butt, / no bullet meant for her / to take the misses and the hits / into her guts." Despite the widened scope of imagery that her police experience offers, the poetic imagination willfully, or here perhaps playfully, pushes and pursues a slender complication beyond any positively achieved meanings or effects. The wonderfully revealing spontaneous pun of "the last to reap, / the first to yield" adroitly overcomes its apparently commonplace exaggerations, but those two clean-cut lines are framed by two overly stressed metaphors. The potentially suggestive "drip irrigated home maker" is given no room for exploration with other metaphorical or direct descriptors, and the titular firing-range image, besides being awkwardly expressed, is similarly curtailed by "the law breaker" on one side and "guts" on the other - followed, as it happens, by the completely unassimilated ideas in the following stanza: "Womanhood - culture free / culture fair / in love and despair."

Surprisingly, poem after poem extends over two or three pages, offering opportunities for exploring rather than merely displaying a wittily conceived image or situation. The more fully accomplished poems, however, tend not to be reminiscential or narrative in their approach. This is "Captive" entire: "Why don't you break out / as leukoderma on my body. / Why do you chicken-pox me / through thick and thin? / Why doesn't my helmet / crush under your trunk / or you read aloud my / name on Martyr's Day? //Why have I kneaded / you into me? / Why can't I simply / roll you, bake you, / chew you, burn you / and be free?" As commonly happens, the antecedent of "you" modulates neatly from an obsessive love to the poetic impulse itself. However, "leukoderma" is not wittily precise enough to justify its weight and position; "through thick and thin" gives up too quickly after the sharpness of "chicken-pox me"; "my helmet / crush under your trunk" is not sufficiently active or bodily; "or you read" would work better as "Why don't you read . . . ?" In the forceful feminine baking image the final freeing leap to "burn" may be unnecessary. Still, as a whole, the poem succeeds with redeploying and expanding recognizable feelings in a small compass.

There is a welcome wryness in Tejdeep's undeniably feminist analyses of contemporary Indian "womanhood." Like other female poets, she sees women as caught between not only their anger at and attraction to male power (and its attendant arrogances and ignorances) but also their nostalgia for and subversive (subaltern?) attitudes toward the oppressive, male-biased traditionality that presides over a comparatively open modern urban environment. We can indeed hope this talented woman continues to expand the scope of Indian English poetry by developing not necessarily linguistic restraint but certainly poetic craft.

John Oliver Perry Seattle