To have a book of selected poems out in the world is something of a statement about one’s art. It testifies to a long and patient journey with poetry, a sustained engagement with its mysteries and limitations, a devout dedication to its discipline and craft, and a constant commitment to live by its light. In poet Sukrita’s case, this is a journey that has spanned more than four decades of rigorous and vigorous writing. The first poems in Salt & Pepper were published around 1980, and the volume charts the poet’s engagement with words since then.
Four decades of writing poetry
It’s difficult to say what exactly brings a poet to poetry. For Sukrita, the choice may have had to do with the meditativeness of the genre, its symbolic density, and its capacity to project the ineffable. A poem is hardly just words on a page. It is a being capable of active engagement with our bodies and minds and of eliciting and revealing what would often be lost in prose. Poetry, to say the least, is a heightened awareness of language and of the expansive relationship between language and the world. It is a way of seeing that involves a rediscovery of who we are, our relative significance and impotence, and our possible roles in a dynamically changing world.
In the poem “Of Creative Anxieties”, Sukrita seems to offer an aphoristic glimpse into her writing praxis, and I will quote the whole of this finely balanced poem:
In the process of writing
I am ahead of myself alwaysAnd there’s no looking back
The rest of the time
I am stalking myself
and there’s no looking aheadThe issue is
That of keeping pace…
It is interesting to note the interwoven play of space, time and self in each of which the poet introduces a division or split. There is, first, the space that is lived in life and that which is created in poetry; secondly, the present in which the writing takes place and the elsewhere of past or future that nourishes it; and thirdly, the separation between the experiencing self and the writing self. Poetic time always marches ahead of real time owing to the pleasures of the imagination and the jouissance of creation. And yet, this impassioned march is to the poet a cause of “anxiety” rather than thrill, because the purpose of poetry is not creative pleasure alone. It is something indispensably more – the need of poetry to be faithful to the self and to the world that creates it, and its vital responsibility of “keeping pace”.
As in the poem above, poetry becomes for Sukrita an avid existential act of balancing, a resolution, however fleeting, among contraries; a means of bringing together, however briefly, the disparate pieces of experience “with / humans, animals and plants / all connected / none in exile”; a meditative moment of surrender to the dance of unity, “dreams of a universe / Of one creation, one life” (“Words Gallop Home”). It is a reason for both joy and pain, for celebration and mourning. In “Creativity”, a new poem beckons to the poet “with promises / of may be / a billion poems” while in “Where Shall I Write”, the “unborn poems” which are “neither living/nor dead” become nails in the “cross” of the poet’s agony.
An engagement with life
If poetry is an engagement with life, there are several planes on which Sukrita gives meaning to the assertion. The book, significantly, is divided into four sections – “Potter’s Soil”, “On the Wheel”, “Fire of Meaning”, and “Across Lines...And Time” with the poems being arranged chronologically from 1980 to the present. Cumulatively, these sections document a journey – of life and with poetry, a poetic record of give and take. Valuably, they also constitute a cumulative metaphor for the poetic process – the clay of thought moulded by the force of imagination.
Many of the poems in this collection engage intimately with the poetic process. Poetry, like all creation, is enshrouded in mystery – “From the wilderness / Of the forest and its stinging nettles / Knotted bushes and twigs / It has to emerge / On this vacancy” (“How to Begin”) It begins with a thought which, as Sukrita insists, is divine – “each thought / merely a deserter / of God” (“A Borrowed Existence”). In “The Art of Wearing Bangles”, the poet compares the dressing up of a poem in words to “the fondness and patience / Of girls wearing glass bangles”. It is important for words to be “The right fit that / Should not break and injure / The hand squeezing through” so that only when words slide daintily over a poem, as glass bangles over arms, can music fit for divinity be created.
The flavour of life
In terms of craft, Sukrita has constantly been experimenting. The book reveals a vibrant visual spinning of words as poems of diverse lengths with shifting line forms come steadily together to explore layered philosophical engagements with life’s essential quandaries – violence, injustice, inequality, parenthood, love, pain, doubt, memories, and language itself, among others. An active sense of space pervades each poem in the book, demanding that the relationship between printed words and blankness be kept in mind. This calls for greater awareness of space and a feeling of spaciousness both within the poems and without.
Coming from a family of illustrious litterateurs, Sukrita evinces an acute awareness of the potency of words. In “Meta-Cacophony” words “are weapons / hurled to hurt, to cause pain / even to kill / over and over again” but they are also capable of healing when “they plug the holes in the injuries / become fire fighters / salvage the battered soul / that rises from the ashes / like a phoenix born anew.” A trained painter attuned to the relative hues and propensities of colour, Sukrita chooses her words with great thought. Her instinct for words is painter-like, making her averse to superfluousness, inflation or excess. Just as a single brush stroke can hold up an entire image, Sukrita strives to make her words sharply functional and capable of holding more in less. Also significant to her use of language is her intimate linguistic and cultural acquaintance with a range of vernaculars that impact her syntactical and semantic choices. They present themselves with a concision that would be hard to find except in Upanishadic verses or Eastern poetic forms like the haiku or tanka.
If the spiritual aspect of the poems in Salt & Pepper is luminous and moving, the social conscience of these poems is equally strong. Drawn with bold and intricate strokes of realism, they constitute an incisive account of the world’s misery. “We the Homeless”, for instance, recounts, in brief poetic vignettes the relentless search of the homeless for peace, acceptance and belonging within “the growing emptiness / of the universe”. In “Endgame”, the slaughterhouse is sharply depicted as a concentration camp where “Force-fed, fattened and fearful / hogs, chicken, as also cattle” abide together “each in full knowledge of / what lies in wait”.
A woman’s resilience
What must not be forgotten is that a woman’s resilient consciousness permeates this collection. In negotiating with life’s passages as a woman, Sukrita offers remarkable instances of courage, fortitude and strength. In “Trial by Life”, 20 years of motherhood are an attempt to build “a cocoon” around the child “from the foetal state / to your adult being” remaining “suspended / between life and death”. “Dialogues with Ganga” is a tribute as much to the river as to a spiritual mother. In “A Dastaan Never Told”, memories of Baji come alive “filled with worlds of wonder deep inside” only to be reduced during the Partition to an image of a refugee on a train “filled with corpses coach after coach”. In “When the Snakes Came for Shelter”, one of the most memorably poignant poems in the collection, a woman can sleep safely with snakes crawling into her shelter but ends up being tragically violated when the entrants are her own countrymen – “Enemies again / they came upon her / one by one, and then all together / in celebration / The war continued for/ Sunungukai”.
There is no anger or bitterness in these poems, very little irony, and hardly any satire. Given their bent to “know” rather than to “teach”, “agitate”, “protest” or “profess”, the standpoint of these poems is that of a motivated observer looking upon life with avidity and keenness and led from one point to another by a graceful acceptance of its characteristics and decisions. A poem, for Sukrita, is a burnished mirror where the meeting of selves takes place. There is a pregnant visual experience at work here where the poem and the poet must reflect themselves on each other and must share their truths to create a collaborative whole.
Salt & Pepper, when one allows it to gently wash over one’s consciousness, is a sustained enquiry into stillness, an essential dialogue with silence. As the river’s desire and objective is to meet the ocean, so does Sukrita’s poetry continually chisel its language in an attempt to arrive at the profundity of wordlessness. As the pot must be broken to liberate the air within, words must be prised apart to allow quietness to flow in. One hears, in many of these poems, the beat of the universe that subordinates everything to the pulse of life, the revelation of the moment, the ceaseless search for truth.
In the best poems of this collection, there is a gentle shimmering that marks a correspondence between the stillness of the world and that of the poem itself, an aching awareness of the world’s essential fragility and impermanence that calls for every moment of illumination to be thoughtfully preserved. As these poems do.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College. She is the author of three poetry collections and lives and writes in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand.
Salt & Pepper: Selected Poems, Sukrita, Paperwall Publishing.