Tag: Jonahwhale

The expansive possibilities of Jonahwhale by Ranjit Hoskote

As someone who has lived a landlocked existence with an endless sea of prairie grass stretching to the east and the high cresting waves of the Rocky Mountains rising to the west, oceans have long held an inexorable pull on my imagination. Every family holiday that brought me close to either the Atlantic or the Pacific was magic. When I was younger I was drawn to stormy seascapes, images of rugged wave-ravaged shorelines, and stories filled with high sea adventure and intrigue. Now it is something else, something quieter, more metaphysical, that possesses me. From the far shores of Vancouver Island to a lonely beach on the eastern coast of South Africa, I’ve welcomed, however briefly, the untethering afforded by the impossible emptiness expanding beyond me, and revived that longing that no river, lake or landbound body of water has ever been able to fully resolve.

And so, I come to Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote’s  astonishingly rich, endlessly engaging Jonahwhale, a collection of poetry that returns, again and again, to gather inspiration, stories and imagery from the watery depths. For Hoskote, who grew up in Goa and Bombay, proximity to the sea has been a constant, one which he admits informs his life, his awareness and his writing. But as an accomplished translator and cultural curator with a seemingly inexhaustible curiosity that extends beyond boundaries, disciplines and art forms, his work cannot be confined to any specific thematic template. His poetry welcomes a wide array of influences, follows maps and legends that navigate an extensive territory, and resounds with an eclectic musicality. The poems in this collection run from multi-voiced epics taking their cues from historical, literary, or artistic starting points, to one line aphoristic pieces and everything in between. This book has accompanied me these past six months, and yet every time I open it I discover a line, a passage, or a verse that pulls me in anew, to reread, refresh, and reconsider.

I cannot assess or review such an impressive collection, I can only respond, which is perhaps the best I can manage with any of the poetry I have read this year.

Divided into three parts, or movements, the first section, “Memoirs of the Jonahwhale” summons voices from a wealth of historical, literary, and linguistic resources, some self-evident, others detailed in the poet’s endnotes, which, I understand, reflect Hoskote’s desire to honour his scholarly self rather than an obligation to explain his allusions. Some of these notes, crafted with a curator’s attention to detail, are fascinating in themselves and may well inspire a reader’s further exploration, but, as one would hope, context, background, and intertextual sources simply enrich the reading experience. They are not essential to the appreciation of the rhythms, images and intensity of his poetry.

A strong musical sensibility underscores the entire collection, and here Hoskote draws on an abiding interest in modern avant-garde music—composers like Brian Eno, Terry Reilly, and Steve Reich—a passion rekindled for me in recent years. It is, then, not surprising that my favourite piece is “Baldachin”. In memoriam Bruce Conner, the American filmmaker whose masterwork Crossroads combines classified footage of nuclear weapon tests with an eerily sublime soundtrack by Terry Riley and Patrick Gleason, the poem also incorporates the looped trigger line of Steve Reich’s Cuban Missile Crisis inspired composition “It’s Gonna Rain”. The result is an extended prose/verse piece that pulses with the energy of an impending storm:

You are the company the name is you poisoner you cannot pretend you cannot hide you cannot swim in these neon currents I am become Death the destroyer of worlds this ocean one open mouth swallowing islands this art of making things disappear in a glow that throbs in the eye that cannot sleep this frame that’s come apart leached the colour from every drifting current this voice that shakes the continents no earthly thing trembles on its breath this baldachin of milk-white smoke has nothing to hide no crystal globe no night of mean knives no shallows no depths all ploughed bare all punctured all furrowed It’s gonna rain It’s gonna rain It’s gonna rain

Beyond the sheer scope and wealth of Hoskote’s poetic vision, it is his keen sensitivity to rhythm, pacing, and visual space—the music and the architecture of a poem—that makes this collection so impressive, so endlessly engaging. If the first section contains some of the most ambitious epic offerings, complete with choral arrangements and refrains, the ten-part poem “Poona Traffic Shots”, which forms the second part, stands as sort of land-bound counterpoint tracing a cycle of rain-soaked ground voyages through countryside and memory, that calls back to the sea in its imagery:

The kick-starter has whooping cough, won’t purr.
.       A dead crow’s beak
points from the trash heap like the tip of a schooner
.       sunk in a shallow bay, a bruise
at first only grazed, then scooped by nautical furies
.       from the coast’s offered skin.

Moving into the final section, “Archipelago”,  the tone turns more intimate, not personal as these are not explicitly autobiographical or confessional poems, but smaller, sometimes quieter more focused, often inspired by art or classical themes. Like finely imagined poetic miniatures echoing history, the unforgiving beauty of nature and, as ever, rarely far from the water.

If literature can evoke a sensation so undefinable and expansive as that which I feel at the ocean’s edge, this wise and elegant collection comes close.

Jonahwhale by Ranjit Hoskote is published by Penguin India.

 

 

 

A little poetic musing: Three recent or current reads and a poem of my own

I haven’t posted much lately, in part because I have been focused on some writing and reviewing for other publications, and also, because I’ve decided to list my house, concentrated reading has been somewhat disrupted. In the midst of all this, however, there is always time for poetry. I find lately that poetry has become an increasingly important part of my reading routine. So, I thought I would take a little time to look at a recent read and a couple of the collections currently vying for my attention.

Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin (Coffee House Press, 2016)

The intersection of essay and poetry is of particular interest to me. This collection takes a wide-ranging approach to the confluence of the two forms and stands as an impressive example of what can be achieved by filtering essayistic meditations through a poetic lens.

Sun Yung Shin was born in Korea and adopted by an American family at the age of two. The weight of her dual identity pulls the explorations that comprise Unbearable Splendor together into a loosely spinning orbit. Along the way, she weaves in elements from cosmology, linguistics, Korean culture, Greek mythology, literature and futuristic visions of being. The result is dazzling and devastatingly beautiful. For my money, the most interesting pieces offer strange and unusual angles on the cellular, spiritual, and genetic implications of being an orphan, often referring to herself in the first person plural:

As we task our memory-organ to remember our life in Korea, we breed dream after dream. False dreams? Truthful dreams? Hanging? Phantom shaped? They drop like ripe fruit, then disappear before hitting the ground, preventing bruising, rotting. Dreams are ephemera and have no body to violate, no flesh, to decay. They can remain fresh as the wind, recycled like hot rising vapor from the ocean, into the frozen clouds, and eventually back into the crashing black water, the source of all dreams, the living body of our planet.

Kafka and Borges offer inspiration, a series of essay/poems feature Antigone, and toward the end, she draws on cyborg and cloning technology. The language is devastating. However, if I have any reservations, it would be that some of the pieces fall awkwardly in between the two forms—too much an essay to be a satisfying poem, but not developed enough as a nonfiction piece to really flesh out an idea.

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Currently reading:

The Promised Land: Poems from an Itinerant Life by André Naffis-Sahely (Penguin Books, 2017)

This slender volume represents poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely’s first collection. Born in Venice to an Iranian father and Italian mother, he was raised in Abu Dhabi. The earlier poems in this collection deal with his childhood in the harshly surreal environment of a manufactured city, and his return visits in early adulthood. His shifting relationship with his parents, how he sees and understands them as their marriage crumbles and life in Abu Dhabi loses any lustre it may have had, provides the material for an strong series of poems. The second section, which is where I am currently biding my time, includes a number of poems that cross the globe and speak to a certain restlessness. Here, is a sample from the prose poem, “This Most Serene Republic” which opens with a description of Venice as his father experienced it when he first arrived in the 1960s and spent a cold damp winter huddling atop the wardrobes as water rose through holes in the floor of his flat. The son in his footsteps describes:

… Those old, porous palaces, whose upper floors housed the few penniless nobles whose hallowed ancestors once terrorized the Mare Nostrum. Those palaces, much like the one I’m sleeping in, smelt like Latin jungles: mahogany everywhere. I love this tiny room and its Franciscan sparseness. All my life, I’ve felt like a Jew, or a Gipsy, or some hapless scion of a lost wandering tribe, but they, at least, have Bar Mitzvahs, music… all I’ve left is this room. This was an empire ruled from rooms: chambers decorated for a single, specific purpose: to impress its numerous enemies. I can’t sleep. There’s a ghostly halo above my bed where a clock used to hang. One way, I suppose, to stake a claim on timelessness, if not serenity.

This is the type of collection I like to linger in, not to hurry through. A clear, authenticity shines through in Naffis-Sahely’s poetics, with a quiet reflective wisdom I am really enjoying.

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Jonahwhale by Ranjit Hoskote (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India, 2018)

This book seemed destined to prove more elusive than Ahab’s famous whale. I looked for it in Calcutta, a copy was sent to me in late February, and finally assuming that that one drowned somewhere along the way, I placed an order with an Indian distributor that ships by courier and the book made its way across the globe in four days. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, translator, curator and cultural critic based in Bombay. I’ve just started into this volume and I’m very excited to see where its currents will carry me. I’m expecting a lyrical adventure along fabled waterways, through literary and historical channels. Hoskote’s broad cultural perspective promises a timely exploration of the political and ecological realities that shape and threaten our world. This, again, is a text, that invites careful reading. No need to rush on this journey. Here is a taste  from a piece called “Ahab”:

Captain of castaways, the pilot calls out and his curse carries
.                                          across docks, derricks, opium factories:
.                                           a typhoon in the horse latitudes.
He’s hurled his ship after the whale
that swallowed him and spat him out.
.                                     The monster is the only system he’s known.
At the bridge, he’s drenched in the dark:
locked on target, silent, furrowed,
Saturned to stone.

I have, as ever, several other books close at hand. I’m finding that short, single author collections from contemporary poets  hold the most interest for me at the moment.

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And, finally, this past week saw the publication at Burning House Press, of my own modest piece of poetry, a short prose poem called “Are We There Yet?” This is my first successful poem as far as I’m concerned, that is, something that came out as I intended. It was written in response to the theme “Liminal Spaces”, a perfect fit for a way of thinking about my own dual-gendered life experience. I did, coincidentally, advise the editor that he could consider it a poem or an essay, since I look at everything I write, no matter the form, to be nonfiction.

You can find my poem here.