When the country’s loved and respected writer of fiction, Jerry Pinto, curates an anthology of poetry, rest assured it’s bound to be a page turner. While the uncanny intensity of Pinto’s gut-wrenching narratives stem largely from his lived experience of growing up and coping with his mother’s bi-polar disorder, and the existential reality of the metropolis of Bombay, take for instance Em and the Big Hoom or Murder in Mahim, Pinto’s linguistic panache owes undoubtedly to his steady diet of poetic verse during those early, formative years.
This collection of poems by Jerry Pinto entitled I Stole a Little Lovely Dream carries 101 of Pinto’s favourite poems and I daresay 101 sanctuaries to which he would surely have escaped when the ‘real’ became unexplainably intimidating. Louis Carroll, Robert Frost, Keki Daruwalla, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Lear, Arundhati Subramanian, RL Stevenson, PS Shelly, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Sukumar Ray, Vikram Seth, Alfred Noyes, Lord Tennyson, Mamang Dai, Victor Hugo, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson are among the greats rubbing shoulders amidst the pages of this volume. The list does not end there. This easy to carry-along book is designed to provide respite from the tedium of the world and our daily lives.
Not that there is a discordant note anywhere but on no account do the selected poems build upon any one particular thematic or point towards new revelations—philosophical, existential or otherwise, but want the reader to appreciate each poem as a stand-alone piece. Popular English ballads such as The Highwayman and Lord Ullin’s Daughter have been favourites for school elocution competitions in postcolonial India as also Alfred Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The book carries a poem or two from the random listings of poets cited above. The curation shows scant regard for spatial and/or temporal boundaries. This reviewer would refrain from referring to the collection as a symphony, tempting as the word may be, for while with a symphony each cord, each note is synchronized to meld into a harmonious whole, which is not the case with this delightful little book.
On another level however each poem can also be treated like a door opening into a resplendently vast archive. I could not help but be reminded of the Greek hero Odysseus’s quest for unending newness as he voyaged to undiscovered corners of the earth’s surface. Alfred Tennyson in the poem Ulysses likens Odysseus’s unquenchable thirst for adventure to an unending series of arches as the horizon keeps expanding furthermore. Similarly, while Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Mountain and the Squirrel, a part of this anthology, can well be enjoyed for and by itself, it is also an ideal introductory point into Emerson’s oeuvre.
It invites the reader to dwell deeper into Emerson’s theory of transcendentalism, American individualism and venture into a readable excursion of Emerson’s magnum opus, Walden Pond. Likewise, Shakespeare’s Round About the Cauldron Go, one of my favourite recitations as an undergraduate student could well be an entry point into the intensely dramatic Shakespearean tragedy Macbeth:
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw,
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hath thirty one
Sweltere’d venom sleeping got
Boil thou first I’the charmed pot.
Double double toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Then there’s Easterine Kire’s Just Be, and this reviewer’s delight knew no bounds on discovering within these pages a poem she’d been looking for since forever and practically given up on, Karenge ya Marenge by Countee Cullen.
The anthology includes lesser-known poems by famous authors such as William Butler Yeats’ The Stolen Child and Keki Daruwalla’s Tiger, an accomplishment regarding present day environmental concerns. In his characteristic style Daruwalla speaks of the extinction of the majestic tiger from the jungles of India. The reasons for this are manifold, varying from human greed, the desire to possess tiger skin and myths regarding the recuperative power of tiger bones. Now juxtapose this poem with William Blake’s Tyger, an ode to the majestic Tiger, and also a lament for what was being lost of the English way of life on account of rapid industrialization and scientific discovery.
The cover of this collection pronounces it to be a book of poems for children, albeit around the world, but there is no saying why a discerning adult would not enjoy and cherish these nuggets as well. For those smitten by verse and rhyme who did evolve into being poetry-aficionados, this volume provides the space to re-immerse into poetic nostalgia.
So if you’re looking for that ideal gift to introduce a young one to the richness of the world of the poetic imagination or for that matter even for an older friend to delight in, and you do not want to settle for yet another one of those mindless rip-offs from the capitalist marketplace, well, here lies the solution to your gifting dilemma! This poetic book is a gift to be cherished and will have you sending out a lot of good will into the universe.