Sunset Strands

SUNSET STRANDS Sunset Strands is Satyapal Anand’s fourth collection of poetry brought out by Trafford. The octogenarian poet acknowledges that he chose this particular title because these poems might be the last filaments of the poetic yarn he has woven all his life. A critic in Satyapal Anand’s native language Urdu summed up his 600-plus poems saying that as a poet he is an amalgam of the psychologist, dramatist and reformer with a penchant for the punch line. That he reconciles dramatic with the serene, noisy with the silent and thus brings polarities together – and in that he has hardly a rival in Urdu. It is true that in bringing conflicting claims on his poetic sensibility togerther, he tries to reconcile polarities in such a way as not to be seen favoring either and yet, like a good artist, leaves a hint or two shimmering somewhere behind the filigreed curtain of words, an arrow mark to what he really has to say. He is acutely aware of tragic weakness in human beings, the ironic contrast between their ideals and action, and he is constantly angered at injustice, exploitation and religious bigotry. His poetic personae are all kinds – the hallowed thinker, the ordinary office worker, the eccentric, the elect ; people on whom life has passed its harsh sentences and consigned to the stinking prison called ‘life’ – which, to him, is a misnomer. He has his characters lift their heads, testify to the truth of their being, as if the tombstones had voices, and then as his poetic voice emerges from behind the curtains, he defends them clairvoyantly, not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves in his poems – but against the inscrutable punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all. It will be good to illustrate some points. About his anger at injustice and exploitation, the first poem which has a quote from Ezra Pound, is a vocal testimony. Ezra Pound had painted a London scene outside a metro station in the evening and Anand contrasts it with the scene in Washington, D. C. Unlike London of a century back / Where you didn’t see black faces / The apparitions here are almost all black / Negro, no, black, nada; African-American, yes, / White ghosts here don’t ride the metro / They cruise by in silver cars; / Company-owned limousines / Liveried chauffeurs drive the worthies / To and fro their centrally heated offices. Earlier in the poem Anand castigates Ezra Pound and his poet cronies who never wrote a word about their cigar-chewing political bosses in the 10, Downing Street that ran an empire more as a corporate business house supported by an army than as a welfare state. The two scenarios, removed in time and place, are juxtaposed in starkly poignant visual detail, one in Washington D.C. where the black populace still hungers for equality and the other the people of the subject nations like India and South Africa in Ezra Pound’s time. The poet uses parallelization, juxtaposition, congruity or disparity, as if these are playing cards, shuffles them around and then deals them in his poems. In this method he is so adept that the reader might never know that the poet has dealt him a marked card. Here is an example of sex urge in human beings, as it is in insects or buds blossoming into flowers. The same unrestrained love commands / The man in the house, young and virile / To follow his mate up the stairs / Dinner talk, pre-nuptial play / The drama itself, played from first / To the last act is the rain of man’s seed / Till curtains are drawn / And the night thickens./ In the garden a drama plays itself out / In the moon-burned, star-stung night / The drunken flowers reel around /And in a mist of golden pollen / Toss their delicate semen down. No sooner than such poems were published in a ‘chaste’ language like Urdu, they became a succes de scandale and were hailed as the beginning of a new movement. It is, nonetheless, not only the subject matter but the technique of juxtaposition that becomes the poet’s forte in many of his poems. In some, as the one quoted below is in a higher than usual key on the harmonium of his poetry. How best she could control him /By the force of a leg-squeeze alone. /I admired her dexterity. / Rising and dripping of salty sweat / Drop by drop, drip, drip, drip / To the churn of merry-go-round / The horse became wooden; / Sprinting and scampering and kicking / The high note once trilling / Sagged chillingly chilling, / Unmanned by her lover-trainer. / Up and down, up and down / Turning nowhere round and round / To the knowing smirk of the creaky bed. Teachers of poetry always harp upon words like coherence, appropriateness, consistency, organic unity – all leading to effectiveness. The present poet says that he has lived two lives in one life-span as a poet, one that made him a classroom critic and the other that naturally made him deny that existence. The new jargon that has come into being is ambiguity, complexity, tension – the last being by far the most important. It is strain and stress that is put on key lines that a make a poem ‘holler it out’ loudly or ‘breathe out an inaudible sigh’ that is more important than coherence and consistency. A maximum of twenty poems in this book can be placed in this category where ambiguity is piled upon ambiguity leading to the complexity and tension that cries out for solution. Here is an example from a poem titled Back in the Village. What do you say of dying? / Hair sprouting in the ground – / Can you see from your roots? / Oh, you can say now / I was double-dared and dying of excess. / Excess of what? / Of blackboard-and-classroom-castrations? / Coffee House carousals? / Library lubrications with eye-drops? / O professor, be careful of what they call / Moral turpitude. Is it a teacher who has been seducing his students all his life? The last five lines would give a clear hint of this ‘moral turpitude’ the excess of which has brought him (or her) to ‘dying’, with hair sprouting in the ground? It is definitely not the case, for the beginning of the poem doesn’t qualify the end to be interpreted in this way. This exactly is what I call ambiguity leading to complexity and then to the final tension before it is resolved. Finally, a funny finding by me is the present poet’s peculiar interest in Ezra Pound. . Even an innocuous poem with a subject like a bath tub becomes a symbolic ‘dug-in’ female cave for a man to enter. Poor Ezra! He wrote just a few lines that I need not quote for the present poet has quote marked a few extracts in his own poem. Here is a sliver of the poem. With Ezra it was a ‘much praised’ / ‘but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady’, / With me it is adequate and gratifying / Even soaking and drenching bathtub satiety. / To Ezra white porcelain lining was welcome / To me the size of the tub matters / Its shape, trim and fettle are important / Fitness and form are recompense / Fuzzier and denser – better for me. The love-hate relationship with Ezra Pound apart, there are quite a few other poems in this collection that echo the topics chosen by American and English poets in their own times but find an inter-textual tone and meaning. What Caroline Greene has said about Anand’s poetry rings quite true. Her opinion is 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 has chosen to bring his treasure house to the English speaking world, it is likely to change the entire scenario here. It is precisely because the poet recovers the extra-cultural, historic-mythological ground of humanity as a whole that the American poets have lost in their preoccupation with the local and the ‘immediate present’ in terms of time and place. John Hays Editor Poetry International