“ I have now set out to do the things / you loved most about me./About a gift called poetry… I have set about writing, / what you perhaps would most love me to do - / write about you,” says Gopikrishnan Kottoor. “Father”, “Wake Us”, “In Passing” (a sequence of poems that forms part of the larger collection Victoria Terminus ) is a tribute to the poet's dying father.
Intentions
That Kottoor should have given himself the permission to write these poems about his father as the latter lay in coma following a brain hemorrhage may be hard for some to understand. But then the poet tells us in no uncertain terms that this is just what his father would have wanted him to do, that, in fact, his father is more than just his muse-of-the-moment. In “saving” the poet's poems on his shelf “as though poems were pigeons/and needed a home,” the older man has nurtured his son's work, offering “a carving of [his] bone/to hone [his] poems upon”.
It is at once easy and unimaginably hard to work with subjects so intensely personal, hard to write of events that unfold even as you write. That these poems travel so well is a tribute to Kottoor's abilities as a poet. Images of Christ's crucifixion intertwine with the journey into the ICU of the poet's father: “I remember you laughing your way into the ICU /Like Christ never did upon the cobbled stones.” Oddly touching even if sometimes over the top, the poems in “Father”, “Wake Us”, “In Passing” succeed in holding you. There is a sensuous quality to Kottoor's work best exemplified perhaps by the poem “The Man in the Mist”: “Someday these tears will end ./ What began as a wild desire, a wetness under the forest leaves , /turns cold, the sun takes on the words/spoken by the lips of rain, / the fragrances of bright hidden flowers/mating in the open air.” The images are fragile, evocative. One wonders though why Kottoor (with just a few exceptions) avoids the Malayalam kinship terms for father and mother.
The second section - “Mother Sonata” – is also meant to be read as a sequence of poems. The poems here are reflections on pain, death and dying and, in this case, it is the poet's mother to whom the poems pay tribute. There are some weak poems in this section. Excessively sentimental and flowery, “Fairy Child” is particularly disappointing: “You were so good to lay my fairy child-head on / When I put my arms around you / you cradled me with misted clouds ,/ as upon lost mountain blues” may pass muster if written by an amateur poet. This inconsistency is somewhat puzzling.
Wide-ranging
“Painted Wagons Rolling”, which forms the third section of the anthology, contains some of Kottoor's best poems. The “millipedes curling up” that emerge in the poem “Digging” testify to the “worship” that “mud-work” is. These mostly invisible creatures of the soil do their “odd jobs” in much the same way, presumably, that a poet does his.
For a poet too digs – in his case, for meaning that would otherwise lie buried. The poems in this section boast of a range that is understandably lacking in the earlier two sections, containing reflections on dead poets and what survives their death to sharply satirical portraits triggered by an old boy's reunion.
The last section “Victoria Terminus”, planned as another sequence, takes us on board Mumbai's local trains. We look out of the window to see old men defecating, while inside the compartment we meet card players intent on their game despite the fact of there being “not enough floor/to even straighten toes.” We also encounter deaths and bomb blasts - all the stories, big and small, that make up the Mumbai local. While one appreciates the spirit behind these Mumbai local vignettes, one can't help wishing that Kottoor had been more careful in his crafting and diction. Poems like “The Eunuchs” and “Drinking Water” remain on the surface, lacking the subtlety, the layers that emerge in “Digging” and “The Man in the Mist”.
(The writer is a poet, fiction writer and academic)
Victoria Terminus: Poems Selected and New; Ed. Gopikrishnan Kottur, AuthorsPress, Rs. 250.
