BOOK-REVIEW
INELUCTABLE STILLNESS
K. K. Srivastava.
Evergreen Publications (
ISBN 81- 7313-727-7.
Price: Rs.150/-
Reviewed by Patricia
Prime
In his lengthy Preface to the collection of poems, Ineluctable Stillness, Srivastava has this to say about his poetry:
I have written these poems over a period of time to address
a few questions to myself and to others too.
I believe that any piece of writing, good or bad, should try to evoke a
set of questions and counter-questions and at least for the time being should
shun searching solutions to the issues
raised, though no one who writes can perhaps truthfully shirk the
responsibility as regards finding a solution to the issues raised.
Srivastava builds solidly on this basis,
adding tone and depth to his statements.
In this collection, Srivastava
insists on the unstated, the implicit and the fragmentary. Nature is foregrounded in virtually every poem and the political and
social dimension of Srivastava’s work is obvious.
Nevertheless a powerful sense of freedom, of life’s beauty and pain resonates
throughout these poems.
One of the most striking aspects of the poems is Srivastava’s delight in the musical dimension of poetry and
in music’s role in giving us a sense of what this life may be. The poems carry
a musical presence – their sounds, the words and syllables that bounce around
us and make the simplest act of living seem deeper and more satisfying. Perhaps
there is also, implicit in Srivastava’s style a
vision of poetry as accompaniment to being. Whether it is “frozen
interruptions” (“An Evening”) or the “splashy sprinkling” of water, or “a
solitary scream” (Immutabilities”), sound in one form or another is seldom far
off in these poems.
What I did find over and over in this collection is the way Srivastava uses poetry to create a free self – positive,
humane, fully exposed to life. It has a
beautiful rich innocence in which he is able to state the passionate exposure
of living in a post-religious world. Srivastava
intuits that the tragic, the beautiful, the truly important will find their
expression here in our everydayness. Some of the finest poems in the collection
include brief concise descriptions of such moments, as in the poem “Cribbed
Infinity” where the poem alludes to “infinity” walking calmly abroad where, it
“left no iota of wistfulness”.
But walked calmly, talking to the silent trees,
The ones breathing slowly but quite audibly,
Mysteriously blue, cool sky teased the shy moon.
A bird disturbed the gossip of the sleeping stars,
Cicadas, in the nearby canal, rejoiced the natural
fall.
“The Etiolated Thoughts My Friend Harboured”
is a poem written for a friend whom Srivastava says
he last met eighteen years back. As the poet says in a note, “He is still my
closest friend and I have not lost
my hopes to meet him someday.” The poem
begins
Well-tempered layers of entrenched,
cultivated inclinations,
Purposefully moved around the
unenvied, tangent
destinations,
Ripping up his arcana,
overflowing with
malicious suspicions,
His
keenness perversely dragged him
into the abysmally low frustrations.
The poem details the friend’s faults and failings but also
his achievements. Srivastava covers a vast field as
he works his way from beginning to end of the poem, which concludes with these
lines:
Never wept he over the scruples of never
invaded themes,
And wandering imperviously, replete
with vivid memories
of blind rays of light,
Found was he absent among the
crumbling breath of
stilted intellectuals.
In the poem “Mirthless Melancholy” the poet uncovers the
story of how a child turns from a grizzling, sobbing
boy into one entering “his odyssey towards a life”. The child hears someone
cry,
“Keep the child alive, defrost his tears,
for only then, the
world would see a new
world, restless, bereft of the foundations of
avarice,
dank, dumb insolence.
For only then, would be buried this empyrean,
Silently, Overwhelmed by it’s
own terrifying erring woes.”
This galvanises the child into
action and he then seeks to find his true self.
The long poem, “Saturday Dinner Party”, sets the tone for
much of the book. Rapturously beautiful, it encourages a relaxed flowing with
it as it reveals its own reality - a world that is both physical and imaged as
language, united by transitoriness, by the inability
to limit or define:
The waiters, dressed in milky white suits,
Having unloaded
their trays.
Spot the glaringly drained gentlemen.
Talking silently through their eyes,
They laugh,
For, they have seen thousands of such drained men.
And draining
women.
Whilst not really
sure whether I grasp it or can construe its meaning, I get the sense of a
boundary world that is not ours, but still reflects us in its everyday aspect.
One of the most important poems in the collection is the
sequence “Disembogued Stirrings”, twenty stanzas that explore language,
desires, solicitations, and much more. Here life’s experience is traced through
a series of fragmented reflections and images. (“The slumberous prophecies
breathed their last, restlessly”.) Images build on each other, set against each
other, often using uncertainty in the construing of line breaks to invite more
than one reading:
Those sounds, the sounds of the
triumphs had just ceased howling,
Suddenly.
Those sounds of the furious seas had
just began
trivializing the delirium, in infancy.
Those sounds of unyoked epochs had
just rescinded the
dissembled rarities.
Guilefully humbled by these, I delivered
the best of what
they never bequeathed me.
Srivastava delivers some powerful lines that
capture the aching exposure of life, the vulnerability of our core laid open:
Logics, reasons, arguments, voices
were never audible,
views
never perceived.
Perspectives, projections, questionable
indifferences never lacked
incisiveness.
Instincts,
subliminal accentuations,
blind anonymities never lacked disgrace.
Restlessly
outraged, I allowed unassimilated impasses to enervate, coolly.
The strangeness and disorientation often present in these
poems strikes me as a necessary fidelity to life’s openness, a valid and
natural expression of a truth rather than any sort of “post-modernism”. At times the listing technique and the
disjointedness enable a shift in rhythm, a quickening of pace. One especially
remarkable section (“Of Rational Morons And Irrational
Geniuses – Some conflicting traits”), different from the rest, joins together a
series of one-word one-line “observations”:
Perspective, And
Designs, Effectors.
Reasons Excitations,
And Consistency,
Context, Paradigms
Situations And
Concepts, Sequencing.
Whilst there are many strong and moving poems in this
collection, I found the long sequence “A Citadel of Arguments” the most
compelling, the one that most powerfully confirms Srivastava
as a remarkable poet. Srivastava’s commitment to the
truth of the immediate, the primacy of the natural world, of our bodied selves
and of tenderness, finds a strong voice in these lines:
Okay
let me begin with a question.
Can
someone assure us? For it’s own sake,
For
the sake of our existence, Mine, yours, theirs, ours,
That
we would not twirl the arguments
That are just born Of our own womb, having lied
dormant
For
time immemorial. Then, can you stop unleashing?
Those shreds of stillborn thoughts. Maddening for now,
Soothing when you and I would be dead.
Dead
would be all of us, with our children,
And
would be alive our orotund shadows.
Quarrelling
with the arguments,
We
impetuously forget, for fear of what?
At 140 pages Ineluctable
Stillness is an ample and varied collection of poems. The poems are well
ordered to highlight a sense of contemplative space. The titles give a good
indication of the range of Srivastava’s concerns:
“Disjointed Memoirs”, “The Rendezvous”, “Discontented Dreams”, “Silence Of An Agonized Mind”. Perhaps it seems most appropriate to
close the review with the last four lines from the last poem in the book, “The
Marginal Man”. Their freshness, their reiterations of all that has gone before,
their knowledge that humanity never reaches its goals, capture well the
remarkable energy, the musical fullness and courage of Srivastava’s
work:
His glorious slumber, vile, full of rages,
Formed the warp and woof of oft-
repeated renaissance.
Weary of unfrozen wiliness, the marginal
man proceeded,
Further and further, towards the never
reachable end of the road.
Srivastava, while never talking down to his
readers, has made some of life’s most important and most challenging topics
accessible in this collection even to those readers without a strong background in philosophy or moral dilemmas.
Patricia Prime : is a poet based in