IF WINTER COMES

Sneak Preview IF WINTER COMES In 1972, The Doyen of Indo-Anglo Indian poetry, Professor P.Lal wrote in his journal, “Satyapal Anand is an accomplished poet. The extraction of his English poetry more often from his own Urdu poems is commendable, not only in their outward forms, but also in their essential quality as ‘poems’. He is unique for his poems display a rich fare of a child’s wonder and rapture, a young man’s ecstasy and enchantment, and an elderly human being’s despair and doubt.” Forty years later, now in 2012 when he has brought 350 poems and published five volumes of his poems spanning half a century of his literary output, it seems that he has kept the same promise to the readers in English in USA as he had kept to his Urdu readers. If Winter Comes has 70 poems. One common feature in all of them is that the poet’s emotion is generally subdued and tranquillized but his craftsmanship is as competent as it is brilliant. Since these poems are spread over a period of time, his mood reflects a myriad and multi-hued poetic landscape. At times he writes with the consciousness of a child or an adolescent and then we find him, like an old man, grappling with sickness, pain and death. The poems in If Winter Comes are hardly ever obscure; they are clear and lucid but not unnecessarily bright and translucent. Very often a delicate balance between permeability and artful concealment in image, simile and metaphor gives his incandescent line some shade but it doesn’t turn into darkness. Gradually one feels that there is an elevation of style and a seriousness of intention in all poems. Caroline Greene gives us an insight into his method when she says: “Satyapal Anand is not the sort of poet who makes technique take the place of poetic substance and sensibility, or one who allows a poem to degenerate into a puzzle. When feelings surge in him unexpected thoughts suddenly assail him, he is content to give expression to them in appropriate language in a style of ‘halting rhythm’ that is more akin to Indian Classical music than poetry.” However, he does not sacrifice technique; he subdues it and lets it take a subsidiary role. For example, in his poem Body Prosody, he uses the photographic technique of – what might be called – double focus and uses his knowledge of prosody, the scansion of verse forms, as a via media to explore the contours of a female body. It is as if a live, warm, palpitating body is in front of him, and he is using his language laboratory methods of exploring each nook and corner the way he might subject a poem to practical prosodic criticism. Did the textual body understand the schema of my touch? Yes, it did, I guess, for the quivering verbs and quailing nouns all combined to put in a positive pulsating response – silent but not without non-verbal vibrations. Having passed this language lab course multiple times With an ‘A’ grade, the sophomore in me is not sure if he has learnt the grammar of the female body language. It is a wonderful technique indeed and the poet uses it in about half a dozen poems in this collection. In One Love Letter the narrator is shown sitting by the side of an open hearth in which he is burning love letters from, not one but many lady friends. One letter, in particular, he starts reading while burning torn up pieces of it. Here is what happens. “You said you’d give up your married life and / elope with me to Europe – where, you didn’t know.”(The fire updraft holds it for a mini-second for me to read.) Like a steel wire knotted into a human frame, /I sit up, uptight and taut./Did I? O my God! Did I ever tell her that?/A drunken, drooling, jabbering fool /…/ A wife, homebound, mother of three /… / And I? A false, faithless fool – a fake frump…(The fire flickers in the hearth and the last pages go up in updraft, spoof, spoof and spoof!) The italicized lines merge the two foci in such a way that there does not seem to be a hiatus between them. Satyapal Anand himself terms these poems as ‘a straight-forward poet double-dealing himself’. Poems in this technique are just about half a dozen in number. In Indo-Anglian poetry in the last forty years ‘protest poetry’, ‘poetry of young-adults, ‘new poetry’ are labels given to the new-fangled poetry influenced by the West. Thematically such poems could be poetry of escape as well. It might don, at times, the accoutrements of Hippie counter culture. Anand’s poems transcend protest and escape alike and become rather a new affirmation, a bold nectarine answer to the poison of the present – a glimpse of Paradise beyond Hell’s circles and Purgatory’s slopes. Let’s take 0ne example. In a poem titled The woman with shaved head, the speaker himself suffers from prostate cancer. He and a woman with brain cancer use the same car to and fro the hospital. They talk. Humorless pathos enters the scene when she asks if they could exchange their cancers. How could they? He asks. She says that women do not have prostates, so what would she do with prostate cancer. Then comes a moment when she mystifies both herself more than him by musing aloud as to who gives to whom and what in man-woman relationship. The sperms get out of the prostate, she said / and then enter the uterus. Isn’t it? / Man gives and woman receives…but then she / gives back a thousand-fold, a live baby! Isn’t it? / Yes, I said, you are right. When all is said and done, Anand’s 70 poems have all that a discriminating reader desires in a collection of this caliber. Adoration, love, fancy, imagination, desire, sensuality, humor, satire, romance, conceit, cynicism, satire – all colors of the spectrum are here; one needs a good garnering eye to gather them all.