Collected Poems
Author : Jeet Thayil
Publisher : Aleph, Rs 599
Collected Poems has a life breathed into it which shows us Jeet Thayil’s shifting worlds and situations. In fact, throughout the book, Thayil’s wandering self tells stories of addiction and withdrawal, writes MIHIR VATSA
Jeet Thayil’s Collected Poems begins with a short preface in which he announces the decision for These Errors are Correct to be his last collection of poems. Published in 2008, These Errors Are Correct had won Thayil a Sahitya Akademi Award, so the sudden arrival of a definite published oeuvre is surprising. Spread over five sections, the book includes poems from his four poetry collections Gemini (1992), Apocalypso (1997),English (2004), and These Errors Are Correct (2008) — and a selection of new and “uncollected” poems written during 2003-2015. With over 250 poems, this sizable volume takes the reader into Thayil’s real and imagined worlds as his poetry develops over a span of 24 years.
There is a gradual shift in the sound of poems as one reads from Gemini to These Errors Are Correct. In fact, poems like Gemini and Apocalypso are formally wrought with distinct rhythm rooted in several poetic forms. In English and These Errors Are Correct, the themes slowly acquire layers and sentiments turn complex. Urbanity becomes less of an observational chart and more of an understanding of personalised spaces. Evolved content complements newer forms of prose and list poetry. Thayil’s subjects increase. His angels Gibreel and Beelzebub visit cities, his shapeshifters hold mirrors to our lives, his Augustine, feeble in the storm of desire, prays, “let me be chaste, lord, but not today/for today there’s she & she & she”.
English is a recurrent concern in Thayil’s work. He laments the tendency of writers who, writing in English, play up “various Indiannesses/for an audience that doesn’t reside here”. Through cultural contradictions and irony, the awareness of English’s presence in his work evokes polar sentiments of desperation and fulfillment.
Thayil’s English is globalised and carnivalesque, innovative and disruptive, branching wide across continents, and looking painfully for its elusive roots. This is realised in poems from These Errors Are Correct where, in its urgency and desperation, the language brilliantly articulates the nuances of separation. Thayil throws at us his many worlds with people, caricatures and situations. Behind the shadow, Thayil’s poetic persona is that of a disinterested archaeologist, digging deeper into the frailties of human existence for the purpose of study but uncovering each fold with a cynical, unsentimental critical distance.
Expressions of intimacy and belonging transcend the autobiographical, incorporating several cultural and linguistic subtexts, affecting, and at the same time being affected by, relationships formed with elements of the universe. From cosmopolitan cities to shifting seasons, Thayil’s world is extensively interconnected and fluid. lust from Gemini gives way to various manifestations of intimacy in These Errors Are Correct, and everything — living, dead, and material- are woven together by the crucial principle of loss.
Thayil says in the preface that time, once his friend “is now the enemy”. The awareness of time, the inevitable disillusionment with grand narratives, and a final solitary dejection run throughout the book. Death, stinking of brashly made promises, is a process rather than an event, accompanying its equally putrid brother, Travel. Both brothers have their own histories of evolution. In Thayil’s universe, what is grand is continuously challenged by sharp, cutting rhetoric in a postmodernist flair.
The breakdown of grand narratives into microcosmic worlds puts everything in a state of flux, and the archaeologist is forced to admit that he knows, like Icarus, how to soar, but “not how to land”. Chronological continuity, or its lack, in Thayil’s work comes across when a letter from a Mogul emperor is read in 2006, when the snake is asked to “laugh out loud” when the skim falls off, when a poem remains a fragment, when there’s only a blank page for “The Consolations of Age”.
Throughout the book, Thayil’s wandering self tells stories of addiction and withdrawal. Poems inspired by the nostalgia for narcotics appear periodically. The point of heroin is that it creates the wasted time “which comes back lovely sometimes”. The Sisyphean question of “why push the stone back up the hillIJ” along with the realisation that the time does return “to punish you with the time you killed” almost effectively nullifies the slightest chance of rehabilitation. Thayil’s debt to poets he admires and is influenced by erupts in confessions, eloquent and abrupt, in realising the texture of Moraes’ hand upon handshake, in declaring, after borrowing a line from Baudelaire for a poem, that he is over the celebrated poet “at last, in Mexico City”. Each site of love and separation, religion and politics, humility and confidence, art and artistry, among several others, is the site of perpetual questioning and reconciliation resulting from the poet’s nomadic curiosity
Collected Poemshas a life breathed into it which shows us Thayil’s shifting worlds and situations, each replete with its own sustaining mechanism. The poems, when read chronologically, depicts the discomfort of refracted roots, his obsession with examining the relevance of English language without concrete results, the refraction of previous grand truths into banal platitudes vulnerable to mockery, and the push and recoil of nuanced sentiments steering all myriad worlds to their uncertain ends. Having assessed that he is “unable to equal the poems” in These Errors Are Correct, Thayil gives a brief tour of some poems that happened before and after 2008 in the very first section of the book, demonstrating poetically the careful crafting of the fear of a final halt.
The reviewer is the author of Painting That Red Circle White