Ranjit Hoskote in The Hindu
THE 34 poems that form Jerry Pinto's first book of
poems, Asylum, mark the emergence of a distinctive
voice in Indian poetry. While Pinto has been represented
in journals since the early 1990s, and in a Viking anthology
of new-generation poetry edited by the present reviewer
in 2002, his poems have been largely confined to reading
circles and photocopy circulation. Such recourse to
an informal, word-of-mouth tradition has been the norm
among Indian poets in English during the last decade,
as mainstream publishers have clamped the spigot on
their poetry lists and small presses have proved to
be dazzling but short-lived. This orality of transmission
holds a curious appropriateness in Pinto's case. Word-of-mouth,
in a significant and exact sense, describes the locus
that his poems inhabit: he writes in a cadenced yet
speaking voice, that carrier of irony and pain, self-irony
and melancholia, which revisits the fields of inherited
memory even as it probes the half-blocked channels of
desire.
From the memoirist's impulse spring some of the most
moving poems in this collection: as narratives, they
retell family lore, tales of escape and resettlement,
loss and growing up; as reflections, they define an
archive of hereditary attitudes and patterns of image,
in relation to which he may define his own position
as individual and poet. The book's emotional energies
are held in parentheses between its eponymous poem,
"Asylum", and its closing one, "Bedside".
The first an oblique portrait, the second a direct address,
both are dedicated to the poet's mother, now no more;
they speak to her long-term condition of mental and
physical indisposition, and to the intertwined nature
of their lives, determined for many years by a "litany
fresh off the shelf:/ Tegretol, Anxol, Espazine, Hexidol/
Neurobion, Arrovit, Shelcal, Diazepam." The reader
who feels a current of unease as he begins Asylum
is shocked and changed by the self-searing candour of
the poem that closes the book: "I have no beliefs
here, only a watchfulness./ My world condenses into
an ink-stain/ As your voice trails after me from room
to room./ I made promises to you, standing in the toilet./
By the skull of the Cyclops that drank my piss/ I broke
those promises, one by one? And know that is why I cannot
love."
In "Exiled Home from Burma", the poet draws
on his grandmother's memories of travelling back to
the safety of India during World War II, as the Japanese
armies swept through Burma. The poet's great-grandmother
is an astute strategist of the micro-level: "Bombs
have no eyes./ They will not see it is my Johnny,/ A
good boy who took his mother dancing./ But God has ears
that we can storm." As the Axis troops march through
teak forests and the captain of the evacuation ship
throws a piano overboard to lighten the vessel, cherished
objects sink and family lore takes their place.
If Pinto shows himself willing to address near-destabilising
emotion in these acts of homage to survival, he is even
more transparently vulnerable in his poems of desire
and self-confession. "At Thirty" demonstrates
an ability to look unsparingly at the self: its worldly
choices, carnal desires, and failures to connect. Following
the succession of avatars he assumes, as old cells are
sloughed off and replaced by new, as the limbs register
changes unmeditated by the mind, the poet concedes defeat
to an entity that is "My body in name only/ My
body that refuses to settle down/ My body that will
not acknowledge me."
Pinto has the makings of a dedicated jeweller of intimisme,
with his unerring grasp of the occasions when the deepest
feelings, of identity and hurt, can be betrayed into
language. In "Cetacean Song", he crafts an
antiphony between the song of human need and the singing
of whales, contrasting the words through which humans
make themselves and their relationships against the
instinctive music that animals weave together. "Bound
by the need for breath/ We lie on beds of foaming rubber":
opening with this startling image of mattress as tide,
the poem dwells on the distances that always haunt intimacy,
to end with the words of the wandering soldier's longing
from Xenophon's Anabasis: "Outside the window/
The sea, the sea."
In such poems, Pinto reveals his alignment with the
poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, especially the middle-period
Ezekiel of the 1960s and 1970s. While many poets in
the last quarter of the 20th Century grew up to emulate
the master, they achieved little that was not epigonic,
that did not reduce Ezekiel's experiments with self-exposure
and everyday language to the merest mannerism. Pinto,
coming as he does after this great wash of imitatio,
learns from the guru's preoccupations rather than his
style. He follows Ezekiel in balancing precariously
between reason and passion and having the nerve to admit
as much; in articulating the predicament of the intellectual
who may make common cause with the subaltern, but who
must return to his writing table to make sense of himself.
Pinto's poems return often to the gestures of caring
and spurning, of nurturing and poisoning; his poetry
turns on the subtle recognition of the twinned nature
of these gestures in life, and of the alacrity with
which one may turn into the other. In "Dadiba's
Matka", he uncovers the intertwined roots of love
and hatred, death and fertility. The utensil memorialised
in the poem's title is a sort of present-day Indic urn
from which Pinto draws conclusions for life and art:
"As Dadiba shrivelled and died/ His matka began
to bloom/ Until the roaches walked from it/ Coated with
pollen./ Moss festooned it without and inside/ It was
alluvial with silt so rich/ It grew orchids."
Pinto is a poet of place and season, alive to detail.
He records the organic life of vegetation in the concrete
jungle, creeper fighting cement; he traces a fungoid
patch of wall and accounts for leaf mould and moss as
they smear across architecture sagging from the blows
of successive monsoons and the plans of developers.
There is always a suggestion that the buildings on which
Pinto's eye rests could just as easily be bodies; and
the sensuousness of his detail can pass seamlessly from
nectared elegance to poisoned alarm.
In "Dreaming at Mukesh Mills", one of the
most accomplished poems in this volume, Pinto guides
us into a textile mill rendered derelict by a strike,
now used as a location by film-makers. A man who once
worked there, and his son, a film technician, intersect
as participants in different realities staged in the
same space. The dream ends in a moment of setback delivered
as a delirious anti-epiphany: "The hoarse voices
around him become tug-boat cries./ The sun is a floodlight,
he is reeled up flat,/ The mill will go. The sun will
lose./ He can taste defeat and it is strangely like
his own spit."
The six brief, resonant poems gathered to form a sequence
titled "Tree" are a portrait gallery. Each
arboreal sitter is chosen from the urbanscape of Mumbai,
from the neighbourhoods that Pinto has known in his
various roles as resident, writer and flaneur. Each
tree represents both its own specific reality of pollination,
blight, prickliness or rooted heaviness, as well as
a corresponding human predicament. Each permits us a
moment of recognition. We are captivated by the visuality
of "Tree 6", which reads, in its entirety:
"Not so much a tree-trunk/ As a gush of melting
wood:/ The mane of Medusa after an oiling,/ Dripping
cannon-balls of seed-rich sweat." The sequence
draws unselfconsciously on Greek and Sanskrit epigram,
"Tree 5" opening with the Bhartrihari-style
"Like that assassin, love,/ The streetlight waited
quiescent/ Within your leaves."
Poetry, to Pinto, is a refuge, a place of calm reassessment
of self and others; and yet he is aware of its fragility,
and to the poet's vulnerability to pressure. When he
meditates on a communication, on its writing and stamping,
its passage through the hands of postal clerks and postmen,
in the subdued but haunting "Letter", we know
that he is thinking of poetry, of the risk of committing
self-revelation to the inflections of poetry. We take
his questions away with us as we close the book: "What
chance does a letter have?/ Overwhelmed by a semi-circular
sky and a diametric sea,/ Weighing at so many grammes
and so many rupees/ Against millions of tonnes of air
and parody/ ... What chance? Against its own words?"
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