Reading Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s 10th anniversary edition of Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions is like descending into still water, staying deep into its undercurrents with poise and possibility of epiphanic surprises.
Trudging along the sensitive fault line of spirituality and art, the poet digs out poems which have incantatory surcharge and aesthetic finesse. Even in their translated version, the poems retain the candour and luminosity of experience drenched as it is in the solitude of the self. Each poem offers an icebergian glimpse of an introverted self that speaks mildly and frugally without any anxiety of performance. Chowdhury’s poems demand a patient re-reading for much is left unsaid, not because there is a crisis of language, but because poetry in his case has to be a homage to the absent, the ‘other sky’. The Foreword by Don Martin, the Translator’s Note by Kiriti Sengupta and an interview with the poet towards the end handhold the reader to make sense of the complexities of the collection.
Solitude seemingly could be very flat, and therefore very oppressive. Chowdhury’s solitude however is animated by its inner quarrels and resonances. Even saying ‘sorry’ needs an imaginary other, a notional companion so as to lend meaning to the act of apology. The very act of creativity is an act of self-attrition, it is scooping ‘some portion out from within’. It is this self-inflicted ‘eternal wound’ that hosts poetry—which arrives ‘like rumours inside the mind’. He heals his existence by his wounds. Sometimes the poems surface, sometimes they just circulate.
This is the poetics and credo of the poetry of solitude, embalmed loneliness. The poet crosses the bridge, but as he crosses, he demolishes it to suffer the pangs of forlorn life all over again. He finds himself only to be lost again. ‘Desperately inviting/ longstanding grief’, he places his queries to the shadows. This kind of self-talk—a symptom of mental disorder for some, is the very occasion of poetry for Chowdhury.
Solitude and sorrow are natural bedfellows. Roy Chowdhury basks in the glory of sorrow: ‘Let there be sorrow,/ this is no big deal./ Let me be adorned/ by the silence of grief.’ A sorrowful solitariness is a cherished state to be in: ‘A solitary soul lies intimate/ with the mortal being’. Of course, in lines such as these, the textuality of the poetic idiom thins down, and poetry begins to sound like a spiritual requiem. The imagery of diving deep overtakes the imagery of navigating across: ‘I dip into the water just for you./ You look at the vast sea, its coast….’. Poetry has to strike a balance between these vectors of experience. It cannot afford to be self-indulgently vertical, nor can it just traverse the landscape without the risk of self-annihilation. In the following lines, the two vectors achieve the necessary level of poetic tension: ‘I consider myself a cursed bird with broken wings;/ I’ll walk by my chest to reach the line/ as the sky ends to meet.’
In moments of solitary quietness, Chowdhury strikes intimate relations with insects and other non-human beings. Interestingly, a slow-moving caterpillar, or a dancing butterfly enhances his craving for self-consuming privacy all the more. He asks a caterpillar: ‘Come here, eat my leaves.’ A butterfly augments his romanticization of loneliness: ‘Why couldn’t I become much lonelier?’ Separation is the very start of life’s journey. The poet draws a sense of we-ness by aligning himself with all kinds of things around him: ‘When I said “we”/ I meant roadside flowers, village river,/ unknown birds as well.’ Trees simply enamour him for they face the vagaries of life with stoic sense of solitude: ‘The hibiscus lives in solitude as expected./ Lost people do exist, more or less, in a similar way.’ He loves and envies trees for they shall outlast his lifetime to ‘fetch the rain/ a day after my [his] death’.
Roy Chowdhury often lapses into bouts of metapoetry, which is a sign of artistic maturity. There are poems on poems, on the art of poetry, or on the creative process. The role of the said and the unsaid, the written and unwritten in a poem is articulated thus:
The space between
the lines of a poem
isn’t genuinely white
A poet’s yearning is half-
revealed. The rest is kept hidden
in the deep of the stretch.
While the directness of belief has its own wild fury, the poet is equally alert to the aesthetic bliss of poetic indirections:
Here is direct belief:
a wild kiss can be referred to
as a fire-lamp
As indirect one, on the other
a glow-worm enjoys dinner between the lips.
It is such sensuous juxtapositions that add thick textuality to the poetic emotion. In another poem, the poet seeks to enter ‘inside’ the sun so as to feel the blaze of criticism: ‘Reader, do you know I flare in your critique?’
At times, Chowdhury’s poems climax into quotable quotes, which speaks of the strong sense of denouement that his poetic arguments organically culminate into. In lines such as these—‘Tolerance is a profound protest’ or ‘There is humiliation/ before the sky’ or, ‘All deaths are indebted to the birth’—the subtlest and unmanageable ironies of life collapse into epigrams. In Chowdhury’s case, the lack of length does not suggest the loss of narrative struggle, rather it points towards the growing intensity of such a struggle. In a sentence like this—‘Keep an insane lamp/ the last bugs on the planet/ remain poetry-starved’—the poet takes into poetic sweep the entire tradition of sufi and bhakti poetry of seductive, suicidal love. In the poignant poem ‘True and False of Father’, the poet as father asks his daughter (which is poetry) to be his ‘friend’ for he remembers his relation with his father to be of hegemonic kind. The last lines mark the climax of self-reflexivity that Roy Chowdhury possesses towards his art:
Father’s rule. No one forgives the faults
of a ruler! But friends can be pardoned
for their guilt many times in a lifetime.
Akshaya Kumaris Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh.[/ihc-hide-content]