Review: 'Noon' And Selected Poems By Jayanta Mahapatra

Published by Ketaki Foundation Trust

MRP: Rs. 299/-

It's nothing short of euphoria that the living legend and poster boy (boy!) of Indian English poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra has come up with his 22nd collection of poems, at the ripe old age of 95. This calls for a certain celebration among poetry enthusiasts like me who have grown up reading and admiring his intense poems. Brought out exquisitely by the Ketaki Foundation this slim volume 'Noon' contains his new, and selected poems from his earlier collections. Mahapatra's looming presence in the realm of Indian English Poetry spans more than half a century. His literary trajectory is illuminated with some of the most coveted honours including Sahitya Akademi award in 1981, participation in the International Writing Program at Iowa (USA), holding poetry chairs in universities abroad, and getting anthologised in prestigious publications across the world. He was bestowed with Padmashree Award by the Govt of India in 2015 which he sought to return in protest against the ‘rising level of intolerance and stifling freedom of expression’. Needless to say, he read poetry all over the world.

In this era of post-truth, a subtle and deeper understanding of truth is to be found only in poetry, as in Mahapatra's. Keeping the politics of his poetry and the aesthetics of the medium in fine balance, he writes, suspecting his own relevance as a poet:

"The worn-out face of India
holds the weak eyes of dumb, solitary poets who die alone."

The ace poet that he is, one feels amazed by the intensity of his poems and the surreal beauty they evoke; an abstract kind of beauty that's less visual but more visceral. His poems don't fall into the trap of 'feel-good' art that has blunt edges and lacks the sting. His poems won't take you to picturesque lands. There is a certain savagery to the 'beauty' his poems evoke, a certain ruthlessness dogs his world, reigned by a lingering sadness and pain; overall, a dark world in every sense, with all its precarity exposed naked, all its illusions shattered to pieces:

"I heard him say: my daughter, she's just turned fifteen. Feel her. I will be back soon,
your bus leaves at nine."

..

She opened her wormy legs wide.
I felt the hunger there."

Obscurity, once a hallmark of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry has mellowed down somewhat to flat statements. As if his language has suddenly burst open like a clogged artery and has become more transparent; the opacity in his poems has given way to clarity and easy communication:

"My pain grows empty like the rainbow:
it dances in the skeleton of the rain limp
with light. I taste the air. I realize
more than half of my life is over"

"Noon" includes many of his old poems, even the ones much anthologized and variously discussed; the usual suspects like 'Hunger', 'Indian Summer', 'A Missing Person', 'A Rain of Rites', 'The Lost Children of America' etc. Actually, such poems never grow "old", they grow upon new readers who bring newer nuances into their understanding of the poems and see them in ever new light. Everyday concerns of poverty, hunger, decay and death give his poems a distinct ruminative tone and his sombre voice oscillates frequently between the abstract and concrete in its bid to grasp the precise moment of 'truth' a poem holds. Jayanta knows how to use language not just as ‘expression’ but also as ‘outrage’ to hammer the stones of silence so as to make them speak of myths, legends and traditions of centuries. Ironically, Jayanta's 'Noon' is more about the 'dark' and gloomy world of melancholia than anything else; where, at the end of the day, a poet like him has no other way but to sit lonely and helpless with his sadness. He inhabits what he calls 'a small rural place ', Cuttack, whose smell of the earth pulls him towards itself to keep him grounded and engaged with the contemporary at a deeper level, bereft of any illusion:

"Here, in the dusty malarial lanes
of Cuttack where years have slowly lost their secrets, they wander
in these lanes nicked by intrigue and rain..
[...]
along river banks splattered with excreta and dung,
in the crowded market square among rotting tomatoes .."

His meditative tone is so evocatively reflective of his rooted landscape, his dwelling city Cuttack, an ancient city with rivers on its three sides. This imagery of ‘rivers’ dominates his subconscious in so many of his poems, in a melancholic murmur:

”The wind drags me out to the mid-river.
The water that has got that look again,
And that one desire for one to disappear forever.”

Now, could that symbolise our innate longing for ‘mokshya’ or redemption that we all seek?

The deeply tragic loneliness of women is also an oft-repeated image in his poetry. In his poem ‘Indian Summer’, one of his most anthologised poems and taught in classrooms across the country; he says:

“The good wife
lies in my bed
throughout the long afternoon,
dreaming still, unexhausted
by the deep roar of funeral pyres.”

Reading him one feels as if he is exploring the invisible edges and unseeable dimensions of things in the chaotic landscape of his thoughts. It seems he doesn't just 'see' things, but rather gets 'haunted' by them, so as to say:

"In the darkness someone called God
runs his vain fingers over the treasures
in his planet."

Jayanta's poetry is much more than just fine choreography of words. It has all that it takes to create an aesthetic ambience to proclaim a profound realization like:

"All the poetry there is in the world
appears to rise out of the ashes.
The ash sits between us and
puts its arms across our shoulders."

Intensity and depth of experience and its subsequent crystallization leads him to create and dwell in his own 'metaphysical' world where the poet keeps on nursing his existential wounds. Mahapatra(ic) metaphors oscillate between the abstract and concrete to elevate the mystery of beauty to an organic evocation of space and time. His poetry foregrounds how one could write intimately about one's immediate world, that too, in an 'alien' language. His poetry smells of mango blossoms, and fragrance of wet earth after the first rain, and also has reverberation of Mahanadi water cluttering in between the stones.

His deft juxtaposition of words, and use of images and symbols have electrifying effects with flashes of epiphany. Thus, the 'unknown' and 'uncharted' in his poems make excellent sites which set the reader on a voyage to discover meaning (or, the lack of it) for himself. At times intriguing, at times fascinating, at times simply bizarre; his brooding voice evokes the dark and complex interiority of his private universe, his inner turmoils and above all, his 'politics' of reflecting the reality that surrounds him; all amidst the terrifying loneliness of his own being.

[ Author's note: As I write this, the legendary Indian English poet, Jayanta Mahapatra, aged 95, is completing 22 days in hospital. He hasn’t been keeping well for some months and has been in and out of ICU several times. While undergoing treatment for pneumonia and other age-related complications, he had insisted on having proofs and other papers by his hospital bed just to see that the 20th issue of ‘Chandrabhaga’, a prestigious literary journal he has been editing since 1979 gets published in time.

In the month of May, just a couple of days after his 22nd collection of poems “Noon” was released along with a coffee table book on his life’s journey and works, we were talking over phone. He was, obviously, elated like a kid about the book release. He asked me if I would like to write a review of his latest book of poems ‘Noon’ in the reputed magazine ‘Outlook’. I replied, ‘it will be an honour for me’. He had read my essay published in ‘Outlook’ and was happy that I wrote about him so respectfully in the essay. He told me, ‘Durga, I have seen so many ungrateful people turning their back on me, but your mention about me so reverentially in ‘Outlook’ brought tears to my eyes’.]

(Durga Prasad Panda is an accomplished bilingual poet and critic whose works have appeared in prestigious journals and magazines across the country and abroad.)