Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 2. November 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
On Life’s Variegated Landscape: A Review of Madhu
Sriwastav’s Trips Climbs Circles
Trips Climbs Circles: Madhu Sriwastav,
Authorspress, 2020. Pp 90. ISBN 978-93-89824-84-1
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
- W.
H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’
Aesthetically speaking, poetry is under no obligation to make anything happen, either in the self or in the world. And yet, one would be hard put to come across poetry that does absolutely nothing. Poetry’s essential transgression, as Auden rightly notes, lies in its survival, in its ability to effectively guardian and preserve a voice across the transience of life and the ruin and debris of history. By its sheer endurance, poetry constitutes a record, a document, a witness, a way of happening and a way of continuing dialogue on it – a timeless mouth.
Though poetry is regarded by many as making a
virtue of inwardness and self-obsession, it is in poetry, more than anywhere
else in the world, that one finds an acute consciousness of the inextricable
entanglement between life’s private and public spheres. A.F. Moritz in his
essay ‘What Man has Made of Man’ writes, “Poetry is, above every other
human endeavour, the place where person and society are not merely joined but
revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange,
painful division we have created between person and society is suffered,
despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and
myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity
still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live
in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”
In the poems of Madhu Sriwastav, one comes
across a taut weaving of the individual and the social. Light, lyrical and
often deeply reflective, these poems document an earnest selfhood that strives
to hold in balance the numerous and often conflicting social claims made on it
while struggling to find its own sacrosanct space within chaos. Here are poems
that question the moment, live its crisis and choose acceptance and movement
over resignation and despair. In ‘A Kite’, for instance, the kite’s buoyant
journey is cut short by a rainfall but though deterred in its flight, it falls
with “thought of wind/sun and sky/ in its wings!” In ‘Modern Ways’, the
protagonist travels a hard way through life’s choices and dilemmas to realize
“life is real to be lived”. In ‘Roll N Roll’, the speaker assertively claims
personal space – “Live and let me/ live on my own/ seek other pastures/ the
world provides for all!”
Most of the fifty-seven poems in this
collection are strongly gendered and easily betray a female speaker at their
centre. While several of them are overtly feminist, many of them are quietly
so, emphasizing that strength is not always loud, and silence not necessarily
weak. Many images, here, will strike the reader with their unexpected
simplicity. In ‘Nuptial Knot’, note the poet’s dexterous feminist use of the
metaphor of the knot – “knots cut deep/ gashes skin/ thumping heart/ breaks
strings”. ‘The Wait’ attempts another feminist interpretation of the word
‘dignity’ which has different cultural meanings for men and women even today:
“Dignity a word coined variously by self and
society
Society a conglomeration of men
who seal the fate of woman.”
“On the edge of balancing things/ a woman
sometimes gives in” writes the poet in ‘Dreary Land’ and yet in the strongest
poem of the collection ‘Scorned Bride’, Sriwastav highlights the essential
invincibility of the female will and its patient perseverance to not give in.
Documenting the mythical story of Amba’s tragically shattered love-dream and
her determined revenge, the poem outlines how a woman scorned and betrayed by
men may end up spelling disaster for patriarchy. With inevitable echoes of
Draupadi’s shame and revenge, the poem establishes a powerful cultural legacy
for women today.
Journeying through Sriwastav’s poems, the title
of the collection Trips Climbs Circles gathers greater
relevance and poignancy. Each poem is about a trip – physical, temporal,
emotional or spiritual. The word ‘trip’ itself provokes attention. Unlike
the words ‘journey’ or ‘voyage’, ‘trip’ embraces an idea of return to a
pre-defined base. Unlike, again, the word ‘travel’ which privileges
transit, ‘trip’ suggests a resumption of settlement. The decisive use of the
word ‘trip’ over its semantic counterparts speaks amply for the poet’s
rootedness in her own world and her quiet but firm claim over it. There is no
escapism or urge towards escape in these poems, no fanciful indulgence, and no
desire to inhabit any other world than that which the poet does. A trip,
rather, becomes for the poet an existential search into questions whose answers
might throw more light on what one already knows. Each successive trip leads to
a more engaged confrontation with the self with the result that as one
progresses through the collection, its emotional intensity deepens. The modes
of making these trips are dominantly two – the masculine ascent or climb to the
top and the feminine cycle or circle that leads to movement without arrival. To
the poet, both these modes are equally valid and she explores both, returning
eventually to her own self - empowered and enlightened through her multiple
trips across life's variegated landscape.
In her Foreword to the book, noted poet and
critic Sanjukta Dasgupta observes:
…in the 21st century,
in the era of cultural globalization, an Indian English poem negotiates a dual
challenge. The first challenge is the representation of the idea of India or
Indianness in the poem, the second challenge is the skilful appropriation of
the English language, so that the poem does not seem as if it has been
translated or trans-created from a particular regional language.
The poems of Madhu Sriwastav effectively
negotiate this challenge and offer, as poet Sharmila Ray puts it in her
endorsement for the book “a subterranean echo of dreamer’s freedom, connecting
and binding.” There are explorations, here, of naturescapes and cityscapes, of
regret, possibility and promise. There are overt moments of rejoicing with
equally poignant instants of grief but however profound the despair in these
poems, the poet refuses to be swayed by its challenges. Nearly always, these
poems mark a return to stability by learning to find solace in nature’s
benevolence, in her repetetive cycles that promise change, and in her eternal
presence that vanquishes all thoughts of loneliness.
Sonorous, lingering and reflective, this collection is bound to reward every reader with hope, fortitude and the gift of being able to find a solution to the grand problems of the macrocosm in the flickering but invincible microcosm of the self. A promising debut collection, Madhu Sriwastav will be a poet to look out for in the days to come!