Emotionally flat

The anthology is a reflection of the globalism of the Indian diaspora, but a number of the poems detract from providing interest and pleasure.

THE HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, edited by Sudeep Sen, belongs to a lineage of books that generally have Indian or India in the title. Though published in Delhi, the national neutrality of this large anthology of over 400 poems by 85 poets is significant. It is a reflection not only of the internationalism of the English language but also of the globalism of the Indian diaspora. Many of the poets who figure in the book live outside India, and the impression given by the detailed notes on each poet is that America, rather than India, is the books centre of gravity.

Nevertheless, Sens brief foreword to the book firmly links it to the Indianness of its contributors. He has planned it, it seems, as a counterblast to the international fame and success of Indian novelists in English and writes: I would provocatively assert that the best English poetry written by Indians in the contemporary national and international literary arena is perhaps as good or superior to Indian fiction in English as a whole. Is it enough simply to assert this? Sen says that he deliberately decided not to write a long, historical, and academic introduction, and given that many established names from earlier generations of Indian poets in English, such as Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar or Kamala Das, are absent from the collection (it limits itself to poets born since 1950), this is fair enough. He wants to let the poems speak for themselves. Yet I for one felt curious to know more about his criteria for selection. What for him is a good poem? What kind of discrimination was applied? He writes that over ninety per cent of the eighty-five poets have specially contributed new work for this book. This must mean that poets were invited to send in poems for the editors consideration and does rather prompt the question: how did Sen decide which to reject?

The world that the collection belongs to is essentially the world of poetry magazines, international poetry festivals, poetry prizes and creative writing courses and fellowships. For those who belong to that world, it performs an important service, and all the contributors will feel grateful to Sen and the publishers for their generosity and inclusiveness, and for the very high printing and design standards that we have long learnt to associate with Sens work. I found only one misprintYudhistira (page 248). I was sent scurrying to the dictionary by minds in flight can seel thought (page 212) and learnt that seel means to stitch up the eyes of a bird, though I am still not clear about the meaning of Karthika Nairs poem. Monica Ferrells poem Consolations of Solitude ends with a comma, not a full stop (page 292), but knowing Sens meticulousness, I am prepared to accept that this is deliberate.

Will the book speak strongly to people outside the world to which its contributors belong? Here I have doubts. Of course, many arts haveand have always hada restricted clientele, and Indian writers of English poems are obviously going to be denied the readership of millions of their countrymen who do not know English well enough to read them. (The same applies to writers in, say, Telugu, who will not be read by those who do not know that language.) But even without pointing to arts of mass appeal such as pop music or film, it is possible to think of creative artists with real accessibility and meaningfulness. Earlier this year, along with thousands of others, I visited David Hockneys exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. I have never been to an exhibition with such a palpable sense of delight and enjoyment among all who were there, whatever their age or background. Children, pensioners, intellectuals, amateur paintersall were pointing out and discussing details in the astonishing landscapes that Hockney has produced in recent years, with total mastery not only of paint but also of contemporary video and iPad technology.

Rightly or wrongly, I was looking for something of that delight and enjoyment as I read the poems here.

I started reading the book from the beginning, and was encouraged to find something really good with only the ninth poem, Fading, by A.J. Thomas, a beautiful meditation on his aged mothers dying in hospital (page 35):

I carried on reading hopefully but found myself getting bogged down, particularly in the prose poems. Frankly, the considerable number of prose poems in the anthology has left me with misgivings about the prose poem as a form. It can sometimes work, but line endings do help to carry the reader along, just as chapter divisions do in a novel.

After a while, I began to read the anthology again, starting from the back, but all in all I found disappointingly few poems that I positively likeda couple by Vikram Seth, The Fever Bird and Dubious; a poem called Imagine by Shanta Acharya that managed to avoid any reference to John Lennons famous song of that name while at the same time poignantly resonating with it; and Sens own, deliciously desirable poem Desire. But I did note about 40 poems that interested me: interested me for what they say about the world that we are in and the way that people are reacting to it through poetry.

Four aspects

Space does not permit me to comment on these poems individually, but let me attempt a summary of four aspects that became apparent to me as I read through the anthology.

The first is how resilient obscurity has been as a feature of modern poetry. It has its roots in the modernism of the early 20th century, but judging by this anthology, it is very much alive and kicking. There are very many poems in the anthology that I found unintelligible. A good test is to ask oneself: if one was obliged to teach or present this particular poem to a class of children or teenagers, would one be able to help them to make some sense of it, even if there were levels of thought or experience in the poem that might be above their heads? Sadly, the answer to that question, applied to perhaps three-quarters of the poems in the book, would be no.

Secondlyand this applies to some of the less obscure poemsthere is a common reliance on verbal scene painting that really does not seem to lead anywhere or make any real point. I find myself reading a poem such as Synchronicity by Maya Rani Khosla with its clear and vivid images of a mountain scene in Bhutan, and asking myself at the end: so what? Here is another, short enough to quote where I have the same problem: Bathing Day by Reshma Aquil:

Thirdlythough the editor makes big claims for the technical accomplishments of the poets he has included and their astonishing penchant for formal verseI found a surprising lack of confidence in the use of metre and rhyme. Of course, there are exceptionsVikram Seth being the chief among thembut it was noticeable how attempts to write sonnets, for example, often end up as almost sonnets. Indeed that is the title of a poem by Tabish Khairwhich includes rhymes that to my ear are not rhymes, such as paradise/lies or walls/false. Maybe this is deliberate, and the discomfort that it causes me is intrinsic to Khairs meaning.

Similarly, a poem like Marilyn Noronhas Its Time starts off in seemingly confident verse:

The disintegration of the rhythm here may be deliberatethe hand flails, so the metre does toobut in reading poetry, aesthetic reactions come before rationalisation.

Even Sudeep Sen himself, who is admired for great technical finesse in his poetry, puzzles me with his poem Bharatanatyam Dancer. A note on the poem says the line-end rhyme-scheme abacca dbdeed fbfggfmaps and mirrors the actual classical dance step-pattern and beat. But I have trouble finding rhymes in themselves and ankles, for instance, or in cosmic and in.

These probably sound like pedantic quibbles, and in poetry that is emotionally and intellectually strong they are insignificant. The fourth and the most serious problem that I have with many of the poems in this anthology is their apparent emotional flatness: their turning away from the deep feelings that continuously fill human hearts and minds. All too often what one might call the haiku mode dominates, even in poems that are not actually haikuthough this flat and static mode may reflect a misunderstanding of what real haiku should be. I liked Shanta Acharyas poem Less is More, especially for the way in which (as in her poem Imagine) she engages with our fears about the future of the earths resources. But is it really true in poetry that Less is more is more or less the case? Often I found myself wanting the poets to say more about the experiences or relationships that are their subject. To reduce human interactions to the purely sexual, as in many of the poems, seems a kind of narrowing down, a retreat from the complexity of life in which sex is an extremely important part, but not the only part. The discomfort that I feel may again be what the poets intend, but I do nevertheless feel disturbed by quite a number of the poems in a way that detracts from what should after all be the primary purpose of a book of this sort: to provide interest and pleasure. In The Boys I Love, R. Raj Rao writes:

The boys I love are animals But isnt sex a thing between animals?

No it is not, at least not in a human context, and that is both the glory and the tragedy of sex. In Transformation, Michelle Yasmine Valladares, identifying with two cardinal butterflies in a park in Brooklyn, writes baldly: I call my husband and divorce him. To dismiss an experience as shattering as divorce in a single line may absolutely be her intention in this poem, but it does seem to represent a flattening, a retreat from experience that runs through the anthology as a whole.

For me, the most upsetting example of this is Kynpham Sing Nongkynirhs haiku:

The callousness of this is presumably intentional and is making a statement about indifference to squalor and poverty. But appearing as it does alongside other haiku about washing on the line or butterflies or pomegranates, where the reader remains relatively unengaged, it does not do much for the refinement of feeling and sensibility that good poetry should achieve.

I am glad to have read this book. I did find it interesting; I admire the industry of the editor and the commitment of its contributors, and I liked and enjoyed a number of its poems. But it leaves me with a strong feeling that all of us who care about poetry, and who use the English languagethe most universal and wide-reaching human language that the world has ever knownought to be able to do better than this. Its contributors will feel proud to be in it, but I hope they will not stop at that. If it sends some of them back to the drawing board, it will have achieved more than any of the awards or accolades that might come its way.