FRONTIER lYRICS
Author: RAMAKANTA RATH
Publisher: AuthorsPress Rs195
Rath's poems meet classical concepts of poetic beauty. He tries to weave together human endurance and anomalies. The poems exhibit artistic excellence coming alive with tropes and structures, says KK Srivastava
The world of poetry is a kaleidoscopic world. Visiting poets in different guises, it is full of dichotomies, pleasures and perils, love and hatred, perceivable areas of darkness and hidden areas of illumination, but always enlightening the fugacious potential of ideas and words. The onus of exploring that potential rests with the poets. A poem is the most abstract art with all dramatics inside the poem represented by dynamics of symbols and metaphors. A reviewer’s work, often epitomises more doubts than what it dispels but it hardly deters him as this is precisely one of the principal objectives of a review.
Ramakanta Rath joined Indian Administrative Service in 1957 and held important positions in Govt of India and State Govt. He retired as Chief Secretary of Odisha in 1992. He is a poet with many poetry collections to his credit and came to prominence with his collection Sri Radha recognised as a modern classic: the harbinger of a new poetics. His latest poetry collection — Frontier lyrics that, inter alia, explores man’s inner world, has 43 poems.
In this collection, Rath presents life with all its abiding features of haziness and spontaneity as a continuum where he confronts readers with copious forms: nature, God, religion and humanity. Thoughtful and reflective, poems carry experiences of different hues of life. Revelations through these poems reflect on bigger and more versatile issues of life. Rath, aware of such a scheme of things that exists in the cosmos and not baffled by superficial self-clashes of individuals, tries to weave together human endurance and anomalies cased in such a scheme as in the poem The Morning Today: ‘This morning today is somehow very different. The small residues of its existence. Are already crumbling. It says all this in a strange language — in words different from all the words I’ve known.’
In many of his poems we come across an effortless inventiveness vi-a-vis the raptured images lurking endlessly: ‘I will go back to the futility I had left behind’ (Come let Me Adorn You) or‘If, from the quivering lips of the woman/who is on the way to becoming the sky/the smile she smiles while weeping is subtracted/what remainsIJ’ (Arithmetic)
The poem Woman gives readers authentic image and cadence with unmatched sweep of lines with a sense of estrangement- ‘I kept on running To collect the flowers. I didn’t have the time To see what you looked like.’
Dismal reality of decadence and modern man’s self-division with his consequential alienation drives the poet to cry, ‘protect my dreams from the tyranny of the fire’. He believes in poetry as music for survival-rising and ebbing being ineluctable part of it. There is considerable variety in his poems but irrespective of the sources, varieties cohere. This is the most significant aspect of his poetry. His poetry stems from a self-imposed restraint that is deliberate and meaningful and the metaphors and symbols showcase the poet’s brilliant observation powers imbued with his ability to draw meaningful conclusions from things perceived. Smoothness runs through many of his poems with deep imagination and beautifully crafted wisdom and feeling. For instance, in The listener: ‘I listened to the description of what I could have been but never was.I stood outside that song, with my feet struck in the mud of numerous dark nights’
In another touching poem The Song, we vividly realise a scene where the poet encounters the eternity of a single moment: ‘Does not my fate hold anything/other than this song/that dismembers my soulIJ Haven’t I lived long enough/in terror of this songIJ’
There are questions in this collection that keep resonating in search of answers which readers might either seek in the verses or within. Rath’s poems exhibit artistic excellence coming alive with tropes and structures that are integral to the meaning of poems. Past for him is not the past that is vanished but is the one that comes back to him with variety of concerns and their movements, as in the poem December: ‘In December, trees shed their leaves. there is always a thick fog ahead and all that’s behind remains forever unseen. In December, none belongs to me. I belong to none.’
Mind-numbing inscrutability of human existence baffles his poetic mind and in the process he creates what seems to be uncontainable. lyrically expressive and situated at the axis of the wheel with all its stillness and yet with all happening movements there only, Rath’s poems meet classical concepts of poetic beauty. Once the reader catches the rhythm, lines after lines unfurl, hitchhiking the reader to the realm of fabulous vigour. Talking of Rath’s poetry, Kathleen Raine, eminent English critic aptly says, ‘I know of no other poet who has achieved so intense and profound a poem of love-a masterpiece of remorseless uncovering of the ever-unfulfilled experience of erotic love that aspires to union with the divine which lies beyond human reach in this life.’
The reviewer is a poet and Principal Accountant General, Kerala
