An Armless Hand Writes: A Collection of Poems by K K Srivastava. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors P Ltd. , New Delhi-27. 2008. Paperback. pp. 178+22. Price Rs.250
Finding that the poet has explained his poems through a long preface, notes and footnotes appended at the end of the pages, finding strong sarcasm and negative attitude to life playing the pivotal role almost in all the poems of the collection, I was reluctant to take up the review of the book soon as it reached me, though requested and reminded, the main excuse being that I have little time at my disposal for such works. Vainglorious as our lives are, even when we accept it, we are not ready to easily relent to accept death without a cause and resistance. But even with a negative attitude and defeatist mentality the poet attracts us by his poems; we are dragged, as if tugged by his creative impulse.
The old man could be happy harvesting the golden experiences of life through seafaring but he brought a huge skeleton on shore after his life long efforts. And there is truth in it. There is as much truth in Siva’s trance as in Rudra’s tandava dance. Happy as we are to sing the glory of life, rejoicing the triumph of it, we cannot disregard the defeats and death though they are not the only truths of life. Beauty is there in life as in death. Of the two which one is greater is your viewpoint. Here the poet convinces us through his creative impulse about the truth that he has realized. We sing with him the song of death, however temporarily it may be.
Ideas and thoughts are the mainstay of Srivastava’s poetic zeal. Human lives and relationship between men and women, the ultimate achievements of such lives and relatiouships are depicted through logical and analytical process, which constitute the body of his poems. To know man he often delves down the depth of his own being and brings the out the I to the surface for that is the best way to know the subject. Nature and landscape, sky, earth and water, Sun and Moon do not bother him much. Environment and ecology or divine dispensation does not matter to him to any considerable extent. He deals with modern man’s psychology referring to Freud and others. All the poems in the book are prose poems.
Here the pains of life becomes the verve for creation, the convictions of truth as he experiences, turns to poetic fervour, his poetry though brings sadness, is convincing, rhythmic and artistic. It inevitably turns us towards him. To enjoy his poems we have to read them with an understanding. Strength as he has, he has doubts too. At each step he is not sure what you will say so he gives his theory of poetry and reasons of writing them. Look at his preface first-
‘I have tried my best not to leave any scope for unexplained ejaculations that make the meaning of what I have stated’, he says and goes on to describe the inner mental and psychological processes, which a poet has, per force, to undergo. Among them idea, logic, thought and reasoning acquire greater value as a result of his deliberations. He adds towards the end, ‘This is, in brief, my understanding of poetry. I may be totally wrong but as of now, I go by what I have written above as I believe; futility of an opinion does not alienate opinion from opinion-holders.’
In the process of defining what is and how is poetry he sometimes utters such hopeful and valuable words as ‘Best literature would have died long back, had poets not sought departure from these mundane issues and voyaged in the direction of exploring things, unique and unpoetic.’
Let us now explore his world of poetry. In the very first poem, (for those, unable to step out of themselves), written in first person,he scans the I of him, a vainglorious highbrow as he is. Full of sarcasm, confessional, the poem ends with a fatal blow-
‘I am I,
unstirred within my mental torpor,
fabulously piteous,
but perfectly caged, firmly,
within the frills of my orotund, dead shadow.’ –
pointing a finger at all such moderns.
Serious poetry, my dear Phoebeans, is not schizophrenic verbalism- is his theory and the title of a poem about the inner psychological process of creating poetry. In Love and Relationship he stands before Love mutely, without any effort to explain.
Cicada and Harlot is a poem of ever lasting decay. After spending the night with her he discovers-
‘In morning, I lose everything,
Her, you, myself, everything,
And then wait insolently for yet another night.’
The poet drives on the same feelings and ideas in poems after poems like Mother whose end comes like this-
‘She is dead,
having lived an answerless life.’
With it ends all her hopes and dreams, stresses and pains. The poet finds in it an echo of Milton in Samson Agonistes-
‘O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon.’
They Face; Great Anarch, reminds us of Nirad C Chowdhury’s They Hand, Great Anarch!: India, 1921-1952
Time’s spell on face and everything else creates what seems chaos.
In Old Man and his Conflict the poet asks-
‘On the verge of despair, once I sought quite
habitation
What was wrong with it?’
Then diving into the vortex of absurdities, finding,
‘Crumbling away, far off, the initial symbols of my end’-
he plunges into the inevitable darkness-
‘I walk alone on my path,
towards my death,
with pride, my hand raised.’
In Fading Roots of Childhood a deep rooted defeatism pursues the poet towards a rootless end, signifying a Wasteland- ‘Too ignominious indeed.’ In Confusions the poet drives through waves of words like illusions, hallucinations, moronic desires, to reach a sunken hollow of life- ‘Our odyssey: Our life.’
In that Oh! That one year Get-Together, etc., a long poem, the poet tells us a story of togetherness for a year enjoying the pains of human life, undergoing chaotic conditions in a year long partying, which ended almost in a fiasco, full of doubtful future. Even the beauty goads him towards the ugly as in Rare Moments. In Etiolated Desires the poet faces the ‘Awesomeness of unmet happiness’ with ‘etiolated desires to live by.’ In Connectivity he realizes that
‘life plays with death,
everything else meaningless.’
“she came when I needed her.’- She raised the poet’s sagging spirit. He became happy but a lurking danger, of a worm in the fruit, haunted him. From the very beginning ‘fear of losing the relations I cherish to evolve.’ One morbid idea after the other chases the poet, a defeatist mentality overpowers him to the inevitable end, as in the long poem, Shadows and Lost Relations.
The same thought carries him to another poem, Iniquitous Survival, though in a slightly different form, with one word lines. Hopelessness, pain, sterility, death- all we encounter through K K Srivastava’s poems. Yet there is something in them which keeps us spell bound. We remember Shelley’s
‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.’
© Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2008
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