Following on City Times and Other Poems, which appeared in 1993, his Gujarati collection of poems Jeevangeet (2001) and Making A Poem (2004), comes this collection of Vihang A. Naik’s poetry from 1993 to 2009.
Born in Surat, Gujarat in 1969, Vihang A. Naik’s work is widely published and anthologies. This collection contains 72 poems divided into 11 sections.
Naik enables his readers to eavesdrop on the casual throwaway vernacular of the shorter poems and the more tightly wrapped language and energy of the longer poems. For Naik, his native country is well-mapped in literary terms. In the first poem “Indian Summer” he takes his readers to India and thus achieves the aim of integrating his work as a private memoralist with an impulse to express collective memory:
The map of India burns
with flames of passion
when fire is set
against mid-day. You search
the city, lost
in a mirage. The sun fumes.
There is only heat and dust.
For Naik, the countryside is a powerful prism, and gives him the freedom to explore his whole culture through his poetry. “Summer Hill Devdars” (Shimla, 19 June, 2001) is an enlightening experience to read. In it the poet focuses on the stories which only the hills could tell, except that they remain mute:
They stand.
Tall
Mute.
Now
since hundred years
bearing witness
with silent hills
that will not speak.
In the prose poem “Platform” Naik once again manifests his strong sense of landscape, community and selfhood as the “triangulation” of his work:
Travelers come and go. People meet and depart: squeezed passengers, beggars, coolies, news hawkers, tea stalls and littered tracks make up the scene.
His concerns are also global. In the strong poem “The Final Act” Naik relates to one of poetry’s oldest functions which is not just to memoralise, but to translate into language so that it can be not only an archive in itself but also a measuring stick for the future:
His persona uses a style that in its diction, rhythm and phonological quality, remind the reader that poetry can have several qualities: something “silly. / A nightmare or a dream” as he says in the title poem “Poetry Manifesto.” Naik admits the impossibility of the poet’s task to capture the truth of words:
Reading Naik’s poems with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it is like to write poems at an early age, as we see in “At Seventeen”:
At seventeen you write a poem –
You’ve lost your
su’arg. Discover the narg
Within yourself. At thirty
You practice
moksha making a poem.
Naik combines a fairy tale quality in his poems “A Play,” “A Story” and “The Poet as a Young Man” – “He saw an animal in front / of mirror. A portrait / of the poet as a young man.” A discomforting atmosphere is produced by “A blank stare / against the page / of time.” Central to Naik’s collection is the sequence of poems entitled “Making a Poem.” Here the poet writes about love as well as the act of writing. In “A Matter of Life,” for example, we see how the poet meshes his love poem between the first two lines and the last one to make his poem within a poem:
How about making a poem within
a poem? You smell the Ocean and
the sand. A life within a poem.
She composed herself from the surf.
The night lamp burns
at the corner of the desk
life is a philosophy
book with pencil marks,
wounds and comments. A poem
you cancelled at the end.
You think of splashing waves and horses
without reins. She turned away. I smell
the rose. Her odhani stuck to my pen.
In “the End of the Affair” he tells us – “I felt love as short as haiku.”
The first poem “The Pen” in the section “A Poem Comes Alive” begins
These days the pen
is at the end
of making words
that would be
a poem for you,
and wittily alludes to the image of the struggling poet of cliché on his troubled quest, before concluding –
You search your poem
in the silence of death.
It is not dreams, but reality that pervades this collection, and keeps it on track. Naik’s tone, observant and self-appraising, is clear-sighted and without illusion, but strangely reassuring in its ability to state things as they are, and to place them so tangibly in among so much that is unknown.
Here is a real man, as we see in the poem “WANTED” in the section entitled “A Poet.” This is a persona with attitude, who accepts the uncertainty of producing poems, and has a sure grasp on the familiar tasks
which face very writer.
tonight I am awake
with the paper
and pen
words hit
me back in anger
that formed from this same ink
themselves
a guilt-point
searching the lost face
WANTED
by the reader.
The quiet aspect of his life as a poet is recorded, its troubles and its small triumphs. The enduring presence of the writer himself, with his take on life, both recording and questioning, as if commuting between different impulses, in a life of constant passing through, pausing, consolidating, moving on. It’s a life in which the poet hides behind his words as Naik says in poem “V” from “Mirrored Men”
he is different behind
his words of cream
and butter, it serves
his purpose. His language
curves like dark night
of desire, takes turns
with ambiguous intent.
The diabolic tongue
holds fate, as it were,
on the tip
of its tail.
He talks about what he knows, ranging from his youthful beginnings as a poet to poems about his desires. Often, these more tender poems inspire some of his most striking images –
the octopus
of desire
stirs
arteries and veins
tears flesh apart
feeding upon fire
swallowing air
(“desire”)
Always there’s the awareness of the bigger picture, ranged against the contingencies of daily life, often with ironic humour as from “after innocence”
fold all
old calendars
and smoke the time
away
what you get
is ashes in return
the shell breaks open
crossed teens
innocence
massacred
Naik’s usual free-verse style, of continuous down-paging in a rush of short lines, suits the vernacular of his vision. Naik is a poet who knows the real world of the writer and its downside, but is still on top of it. On top of it with his use of words, his techniques and with his native resilience. Through it all, he smiles as though he has the knowledge of the unknowable.
Reviewer : Patricia Prime is co-editor of the haiku magazine Kokako and reviews editor of the Australian online magazine Stylus. Her recent publications include interviews with Beverley George, editor of Yellow Moon (Aus), Sandra Simpson, editor of Haiku NewZ, and Raewyn Alexander, editor of Magazine (NZ). Besides poetry, Patricia writes reviews, articles and enjoys interviewing editors and poets. She has also judged poetry competitions. Recently she published articles on the poetry of Rimbaud and Ondaatje. Beverley George has interviewed Patricia for the spring issue of the online magazine Simply Haiku. One of her poems is to appear in a children's book of poetry entitled Poetry Pudding. She is a member of The New Zealand Poetry Society and a member of The New Zealand Author . She is also New Zealand editor of the American magazine Slugfest . Currently she is preparing essays on contemporary Indian/English poetry and on Australsian poetry. She lives in New Zealand .
