THE DREAM WEAVER

Satyapal Anand’s The Dream Weaver has 72 poems. It is a big bundle to untie in order to evaluate each item. Nonetheless there are some hues that make all poems aglow with a definite style, a kind of bon ton that makes them uniquely different from the literary commodity called poetry in America. American poetry, mostly concerned with the present as we know it, is a different stream altogether. Many of Anand’s poems, on the other hand, use classical Sanskrit or Persian or Greco-Roman paradigms as matrixes and then place them in the current frame of reference, thus conjoining ‘there’ and ‘then’ with ‘here’ and ‘now’.

Unlike the poet who uses his naval as his point of visual concentration and then looks at the world at large as an expansion of it, Satyapal Anand brings this world of far-away climes and distant past to coalesce at that singular personal point. The use of modern day idiom makes even the unfamiliar and remote look familiar and indigenous. This doesn’t mean that his poems are on such outlandish subjects as Arabian Nights, Hindu gods and goddesses, swamp flora, or Zuni pottery motifs. Yet when he does poetize something removed from the American scene, the sinews of his poetic lines being woven by the homiest sort of words are amply acceptable here.

This said, one might look at some of his poems, their sturdy backbones and their warp and woof of words that are their muscular stock. In Your train has come we find the protagonist depicting himself and his surroundings. (The protagonist’s identity will be revealed in the end.) It is the frozen wintery scene of a solitary man occupying a bench on a railway platform. This is the objective correlative of the old, bearded man’s state of mind. He is about to die of hypothermia and the train’s arrival, by a topsy-turvy stroke of the poet’s brush, symbolizes the departure of his soul.

Words are no major concern here; visual images are. A reader can easily discern the snowbound platform, the bench, icy silhouettes, frozen (gelid and arctic) morning, the man on the bench, his frozen breath, icicles hanging from his beard, mouth, nostrils and eyes. There is no mention, at all, of Vladimir Chioskov’s painting of Count Leo Tolstoy sitting on a railway platform bench before his death, but those who have seen this painting, will immediately know what this poem so graphically depicts.

Distant, in terms of time and place, are poems that depict historical figures like Diogenes, the cynic philosopher in 4th century Greece or Shakespeare in 16th century England, but in each case it is a definite locale, a sure happening and a well-known mythological-historical figure at the center of action. For a change, as it were, in the poem about Shakespeare’s nativity scene, Satyapal Anand presents him in third person. The baby is born with the maternal cord bound around his neck. In the intervening moments between the cutting of the maternal cord and the midwife handing over the baby to the mother, the bard-to-be, now a tiny tot, experiences a brain wave – or what you might call, an epiphany.

Is it sarcasm? Is it irony or mordant mockery? Well, Shakespeare is known for all these, but it is the first time in literature that the baby William is shown sardonically scorning what his own role is going to be. It is with pasquinade and derision that he is mocking the adult world.

In Diogenes the poet forges his way into Diogenes’ mind and looks at the world with his eyes. How bleak and barren, how miserable and depressing it might have looked to the cynic!

In this poem, as in some others, sometimes the entire frame of sentence is syntactically inverted; often the run-on lines achieve enjambment, but in all cases the visual images come through clearly.

The Funeral Procession is both a comment and mockery of the famous dictum “God is dead”. If God is dead, what would be next step? Naturally, Hid dead body would be taken for burial. Who would be the pall bearers? What would this procession look like? Where would He be buried? Would there be a succession? If not, how things would run? Well, who is going to answer these questions? The narrator, in this poem is an ordinary wayside onlooker. He approaches one of the pall bearers, an angel, and poses these questions. Some of the answers are telling, some not so telling, but each answer is a comment on human situation on this earth as also of God’s performance in its governance. I doubt if a very short quotation would serve the purpose. I may have to give a longer quote. This is what one of the angels tells the narrator.

Ordinary, bland and colorless are these words. Rightly so, because angles are shown to have little respect for ‘dust-begotten earthlings’ and they must talk to one such specimen in the most ordinary terminology. However, for his late lamented Master the angel has the highest regards, calls him ‘Father of the universe’, one who ‘embodied all existence’. It is, however, later in his harangue that we come to know what he thinks of this ‘Father of universe’. When the narrator shows a sardonic smile, the angel admonishes him.

And, finally, to the question if anyone would succeed the supreme ruler, the reader of the poem is left as bereft of the answer as the narrator was because the funeral procession had gone beyond the horizon.

As the blurb says, “Satyapal Anand’s poetry is cerebral rather than emotional. It reveals many splendored splashes of color and sound. His poems reveal the essential ‘mythopoeic self’ present in the poet as in all humanity. Again, his personae are all inside his poems. “Here” and “now” or “there” and “beyond” combine and create word collages. …His images give us new ways of seeing the world. There is a kind of double vision involved in it. His is the imagist’s faculty for seeing a thing at once precisely for itself and, at the same time, as part of a larger phenomenon.... Caroline Greene says that nothing extraordinary has happened in American poetry in the past half a century, and if an Urdu poet of the stature of Satyapal Anand chooses to bring his treasure house to the English speaking word, it is likely to change the entire scenario here. It is precisely because the poet recovers the meta-cultural, historic-mythological ground of humanity as a whole that the American poets have lost in ‘localizing’ their poetry.