Poetry Engage

The poet-academic has long been a familiar figure. Usually s/he is a teacher of literature and/or creative writing. Nair is a little different: like the late lamented A.K. Ramanujan, she is a specialist in linguistics, and has earned as much distinction in that field as she has in poetry. Her earlier collections, The Hyoid Bone (1992) and The Ayodhya Cantos (1999), both from Penguin India, were instant critical successes, and it is a testimony to the durability of her reputation that the present volume has appeared.

Most readers will be a little disoriented by the arrangement of the poems, though. Those unfamiliar with the earlier work won't be able to make out which poems are "selected" and which are "new". Eighty-eight in all, the poems are split four-ways, in a mathematically precise fashion: 29 each in the first ("Immortals") and last sections ("Languages"), 15 each in the middle two ("Brutes" and "Territories"). Unusually for a selection, there is no chronological order among the poems. Twenty-three poems from Ayodhya are scattered over all four sections. I do not have Hyoid with me, but the title poem can be spotted in the last section. Perhaps Nair considers thematic clusters more important than chronology, but even then she could easily have tucked in bibliographic information to help the chronologically minded.

Nair seems to be a poet who debuted fully formed and who hasn't changed dramatically since. The whole of the volume under review resonates with an easily recognizable, distinctive voice. Nair writes fluently, perhaps a little too fluently. There is occasional loss of focus as a result, as in "Renoir's Umbrellas". Take these lines from the poem: "Taut stretch of madness overhead/ Like a parabola." I was reminded of a Wodehouse story in which the versatile valet Psmith composes a "modern poem" of which we are given this hilariously unforgettable phrase: "the pale parabola of joy."

Sometimes Nair can be quite pretentious and turgid, as in "The Truth According to Tarski"; or simply banal: witness "Love", which spreads such lines over five pages:

you knew about the accusations, the guilt
but you had no inkling that all the schmaltz
the romance, begins with this instinct
for pairing
withrecitations,incantations
encirclements
spells

Perhaps this should have been a slimmer book, a true selection, so that we could open it anywhere and see how good Nair is at her best. She has a fine sense of feminism's relevance; at times she can descend a bummer like "it takes a woman to be defiant", but more often than not serves up genuinely thought-provoking stuff. My favourite in this line is "Gargi's Silence", which takes off from the Upanishadic episode in which "Gargi, pupil of the sage Yagnavalkya….is threatened with dire consequences by her guru for asking too many questions (Author's note)." In crisp, beautifully cadenced lines we are drawn into the fraught space of the momentous agon:

Who turns the crankshaft in my brain?
Answer, Yagnavalkya! How many oceans deep
Is desire? When you touch me, am I sane?
Can a bee taste honey? Why does it sting?
In mean streets, in the slushy yards of pain
Gargi whispers in Tagnavalkya's ticklish ear
Your metaphysics is shaky! We're not chained
To Brahman. He is a prisoner of our senses.

Commendably, Nair is alert to the dangers from entropic forces in the world today. She is in the finest sense of the term a committed writer, a poete engage. The title section of The Ayodhya Cantos is brilliant, emotionally charged satire; it's a pity only a bit of it has been included here. But there are other poems here that warn us of the peril of fundamentalism; one should perhaps say fundamentalisms, for across the globe the phenomenon has emerged in varied manifestations, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Moslem. Buttressing the engagement is a savvy historical sense, pertly adumbrated in "A Haiku History of the World": Foucault and the faux naif charmingly rub shoulders:

The 17th Century
Enlightenment in the Age of Reason!
All lunatics crippled and put in stocks
Europe's best universities are its asylums.

The 16th Century
Great Emperor Akbar rules in India
A Virgin Queen captivates England
Why were kisses never interchanged?

Let me end with a mention of Nair at her most personal, in "Cambridge Blues", which is confessional poetry minus the heavy-lidded angst, and deliciously sly:

At Cambridge I learnt to lie with elegance

To turn to advantage a narrow bed,
A narrower scholarship, sail close
To the edge of the fens but be careful
Not to sink, fence myself with books
But be certain not to think.

In less than two decades Nair has given poetry lovers much to celebrate; let's hope she can give us more.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.