Once Back Home.

Perry, John Oliver

Surprising pleasures come with this first volume from a poet publishing for some years now in journals such as Critical Quarterly, Bombay Literary Review, Kavya Bharati, New Quest, and Indian P.E.N. His work had too often seemed heavily dependent on that of his mentor, Jayanta Mahapatra (who provides a final-paragraph tribute), and so almost necessarily weak, uninteresting in itself. The opening poem here makes large, if conventionally modern, claims: "The bull raging in the dark / of his mind comes charging / against the anthill of your kind / of apprehending his reality. / But when he speaks he is so mild, with such a contagious smile." Rather trite but perhaps not objectionable. There then follow some direct perceptions: "you see, Rabi, your moon-faced / words, or God knows what, crawl like your baby / to tuck her face in your sleeve." The next couple of poems do the moody Mahapatra contradance: "The smell of crackers and rubbers / assails the sighs held tightly / in the concise form of a house, unlit." Overloaded, possibly pretentious, certainly obscurely linked metaphors, juicy phrases, then a solid sounding line to congeal on.

However, hold on: the directly felt baby daughter reappears in "Falling Into Place" and often in similar sense thereafter. If vague suggestiveness persists, it now feels grounded in experience, not a construct of poetical rhapsodizing (which all too frequently emanates from the traditional Indian sentimental esthetic). Even a standard issue presented without new insights works well enough if not prettified, overly coruscated: "There you have gone wrong, / there too loud and strong and / above all you have given up / your mother tongue, they say. / How do you justify yourself? / Your roots are not in air, / as you would make them believe." Achieving confidence in this voice, we can let the "them" become purposeful, "rooted," not just generally referential, for example, to us readers.

In short, even when doubts arise, unavoidably at times - some unearned philosophizing, grammatical slips ("These hands by choice is a whirlwind"; "to make every crying children asleep"), a string of tame "simple village life" poems (equal to Man Mohan Singh's) - still, enough solidity of feeling justifies the sharply suggestive imagery to pleasure us well. A precise word, phrase, or farfetched conceit offers sufficient reason for a bit of piling on: "Yes, someone was needed to record the hieroglyphs / of one's slow coming to terms / with one's shrunken jaws of territorial self, / laid asphalt against the Eastern Ghats, / and a sleep-walking race; // someone was again needed by his counterpart / to superimpose his seismic move of triumph / from the sands of Toshali as far as to / the alluvial silts over the deltas / of the river Vaitarana and Suvarnarekha" ("The Hand That Corroborates"). Once a neat conclusion is built on a wonderfully resonating animal fable: "At the end / the hurt watermelon rolls like a skull or a globe / with my day stuffed inside it like the heart of a monkey / who has gone for a ride on the crocodile's back / to meet his friend's hospitable wife" ("My Morning Begins"). The last phrase almost calls for an exclamation point to remind us of its fearful irony; but, better yet, Rabi trusts us to "get it," and, more important, we have come to trust him to mean what he says, and then some!

"Each One's Happiness" has deliberative longish lines that begin, "Only yesterday my childhood friend got married. / His concealed happiness revealed itself / intermittently like lightnings." This reminds "myself" of his poet friend's similar happiness: "how could you say / the earth has so much of longevity . . . when not a single day passes that does not invite slaps on our faces / and today itself the Chief Minister got beaten up. / We are upset, nonetheless. . . . I envy your glee in seeing every other thing - / your village, as if you only have one, a river / on the fringe rocked again with a virgin wind, / a forlorn lover banking upon a needless future." The "forlorn lover" pulls us back to the bridegroom, both beginning anew with delusions of needlessness that are soon mirrored in "the smiling photograph of Derek / Walcott, his chin resting over the fist, one eye closed / on his Collected Poems 1948-1984." Such quick, sure movements persist in this poem and in many others, though this is my favorite, probably. On the other hand, a poem irate over 490 people being killed by bad "country liquor" and the culprit going free does not suggest a usable sociocritical direction for Rabi Swain's energetic lines. Better is the tone in the next poem, "By the Way": "I wish I could begin these lines / with 'By the Way', dear Adil, / yes, that casually with an ease / even in passing that I had / this afternoon when a flock of storks / suddenly taking off from / the afforested casuarinas / revealed them to be without leaves."

Another thickly evocative poem works hard and achieves insights with a well-known human as well as poetic issue: "Why don't you say sorry / when you feel like saying something / but fail fairly largely / and you do not know for certain why? / Do you think // for you there will be a time / to crack your words like nuts / against the stones of their obstinacy / in not creeping into the skin of your unreachable hands?" This passage uses the Mahapatra string-along, but the technique is here fully owned and controlled by a new and welcome voice in Indian English poetry. The last poem, with appealing and proper modesty, recognizes: "desperately seeking a naive bend / I am yet to know where I am heading." Given this, perhaps we can tolerate unavoidable disbelief in the conventional portentousness of the very last words: "This thing now quickens its steps / to touch the head of its shadow, / now walks ahead of me / playing with water; / its mouth a dark suture." This poetry does better without dark sutured mouthings, when it takes us back to what's going on in the poet's own richly imaginative life, a world we did not expect to seek.

John Oliver Perry Seattle