topics: |  poetry | indian-english

the more i read mehrotra the more i like him. his voice keeps surprising - a fresh thought at every turn. the writing is terse to the point of nakedness, and that is perhaps why there seems to be a luminosity to them.

it's hard to find his books; i do hope some one is bringing out a collected works.

beside being one of india's leading english language poets, mehrotra is the author of the definitive anthology of english language poetry - Twelve Modern Indian Poets - unsurpassed by later attempts such as 60 Indian poets

Contents

Approaching Fifty                  1
Dry Farming                        2
Borges                             3
Inscription                        4
Memoranda                          5
At seasons                         6
The Storm                          7
Ramapithecus and I                 8
Summer notes                       9
Old survey road                   11
The inheritance                   12
The house                         13
Locking up                        15
The photograph                    16
The fracture                      17
I cannot live here all my life    19
Scenes from a revolving chair     20
Dream-figures in sunlight         22
Domicile                          23
Last view from Church Lane        24
The vase that is marriage         25
To an unborn daughter             26
Chekhov Retold                    27
The tranfiguring places           28
the reading room                  29
Tailorbird                        31
Nautical 1                        33
	Those jetty lights are wax candles
	  Flickering over bald cabbages.
	At makeshift stalls behind
	  The Accountant General's office,
	Gray-stubbled, fecund, homebound clerks --
	[...]

Nautical 2                        34
From a Neoteric Codex             35
	Better, by far, the black economy
	Of night. ...
	Fish, coming up to the aquarium wall,
	Glued their noses to it and watched,
	As they did on the day, since erased, when,
	At Hamadryad in spring, recumbent
	On a couch, you said Give me poison.
	I wish I had.
	[...]

Cedars                            36
Trouvaille                        37
Beggarhood                        38
	Loping along back roads, 
	Or sitting in his verandah 
	In a deckchair, 
	Or waiting outside phone booths
	Invisible to none
	But himself, he's 
	The man with 6/6 vision
	[...]

The cartographer                  39

Excerpts

Approaching Fifty p.1

Sometimes,
In unwiped bathroom mirrors,
He sees all three faces
Looking at him:

His own,
The grey-haired man’s
Whose life policy has matured
And the mocking youth’s
Who paid the first premium

This poem is online at openspaceindia, along with:
   	- Ramapithecus and I
	- The Vase That Is Marriage
	- Borges
	- The Cartographer
	- The Transfiguring Places

Inscription p.4

 Last night a line appeared,
 Unbidden, unsigned;
 It had eight memorable
 Syllables. I’ll keep you,

 I said, falling asleep.
 It’s gone now,
 And I write this to requite it,
 And to mark its passage.

Dream-figures in Sunlight 22

    Why buy Bret Harte, I asked, when I was prepared to
    supply home-grown fiction on the hoof?
		Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself_

I wake up in the city where Kipling lived,
Fell in love and wrote plain tales,
Where Hsiuan-tsang in the seventh century
Saw mortal pilgrims making death-leaps

From an undying tree. The rampart stands,
The Ganges flows below, and nothing changes
In a hinterland whose dead-end streets
Have never known raiders. A hundred, a thousand

Years from now, may the sap-filled bough
Still print its shadow on running water,
And a dusty March wind blow its leaves
Towards a page of Kipling, a home-grown page.

Last View from Church Lane p.24

From rented rooms
The view of a tower
That broadcast rock pigeons
From the belfry when the hour

Struck, till one day
The irreparable chime-barrel
Clogged with droppings
And a wide crack appeared

Between minute and minute-hand.
We've changed too. My voice
Has grown blustery; yours
is still as a motlfs wings.

To an unborn daughter p.26

If writing a poem could bring you
Into existence, I’d write one now,
Filling the stanzas with more
Skin and tissue than a body needs,
Filling the lines with speech.
I’d even give you your mother’s

Close-bitten nails and light-brown eyes,
For I think she had them. I saw her
Only once, through a train window,
In a yellow field. She was wearing
A pale-coloured dress. It was cold.
I think she wanted to say something.

   [online at vivianding along with Inscription]

Trouvaille, p.37

Too numerous to be hidden safely in books,
The letters keep falling out, the early ones
Unsigned, the latest full of old accusations.
Picking one up I read along the fold,
What makes you say all this is make-believe? 

Your round, legible hand, mainly, but also
The earth's shape, the exactness of distances,
The coldness of ice, the happiness of others,
The eight parts of the day, the sight of hills.
Things must remain as they are, and I am changed.

--review in World Literature Today, 1999

A. K. Mehrotra, like the best of his work, is elegant and aloof in a world of
shoddy variety and stunning effects. He avoids the rush hour, makes no
last-ditch move. He picks and chooses, when poets of comparable gifts gather
and waste their collections. Mehrotra's perception of natural forms, colors,
and textures often matches the words and rhythms of his poems. When a
tailorbird says "Bring it to me," he knows what "it" means. He looks up from
the sports page and listens. The life so made is a regaling flight "in fields
/ Where gale-winds [blow] / But each leaf / [Is] still, as if // On a
windless day."

"The Transfiguring Places" is another reflection on things and places tending
toward poetry. "It's in the mind," of course, "the transfiguring," but it
always is a troubling session for the poet until all is over. The evidence on
the page is precious, precious too because it is evidence. Mehrotra can
tantalize us with such bits of fancy and philosophy, memory and
memorabilia. "Inscription" is an example of this, rather finicky in form but
expansive in the reflection it invites. "Borges" is a handsome salute to the
master doubling up as a Post-It to write it. Allusion is as allusion does,
its practice perfecting a prayer.

		           Insomnia brings lucidity,
		And a borrowed voice sets the true tone
		Free: lead me who am no more than De Quincey's
		Malay, a speechless shadow in a world
		Of sound, to the labyrinth of the earthly
		Library, perfect me in your work.

It is no coincidence that "Summer Notes" and "Scenes from a Revolving Chair,"
two of the longest pieces in the volume, are sedentary and
reminiscential. Those who recall "The Roys" of Albert Street will see the
younger poet here as well, but somewhat remote and reduced, as in an old
sepia print. There is no mistaking the hearty and bold acceptance of change
one's age brings to life in these poems, but the opening "Approaching Fifty"
has a nugatory air about it. A curious logic aligns that poem with the impish
"Bharatmata: A Prayer." (Independent India and Mehrotra were born the same
year.) And Indian politics will somehow contrive to make that sort of poem
always contemporaneous. But the mirror of "Approaching Fifty" is bromide,
made good a little perhaps by the leave-taking "Cartographer." Then again,
Mehrotra will hate to see the whole of that poem quoted back to him in essays
and interviews! Or worse, having to read it again in some literary history as
the poet's alibi.

				- K. Narayana Chandran, University of Hyderabad

Anjana Sharma in The Outlook

It's a spare volume, all of 39 pages, with a clutch of poems numbering no
more than 36, a quiet, unassuming looking book. 
... Embrasured within personal paradigms — the poems are dedicated to his
deceased father — Mehrotra culls from his life emotions cast in incandescent
imagery that, at times, moves one to tears.  As [in] the two-stanza poem 'To
an Unborn Daughter'. Nothing I could say, clever or concise, can capture the
lyrical sweep and depth of feelings of Mehrotra's words:

	If writing a poem could bring you
	Into existence, I'd write one now,
	Filing the stanza with more
	Skin and tissue than a body needs,
	Filling the lines with speech.
	I'd even give you your mother's
	Closebitten nails and light brown eyes,
	For I think she had them. I saw her
	Only once, through a train window,
	In a yellow field. She was wearing
	A pale-coloured dress. It was cold.
	I think she wanted to say something.
 
The Transfiguring Places works precisely because Mehrotra pares away at the
heart of personal feeling and establishes the primacy of universal
emotions. Less obscure and more human than his earlier poetry, these poems
showcase a mellower, gentler self that is coded into poetry that is many and
one—crystalline, brilliant, unexpectedly small and ineffably tender. The
ironic distancing, the quietness of tone is reminiscent of Western models as
diverse as the later Yeats and much of William Carlos Williams. There is thus
omnipresent the sense of poetry as sadhana and the poet as one who can see
into the life of things.