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ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, Northumberland, Bloodaxe Books 2009, pp.128, £ 8.95.
The Mumbai-based poet, arts critic and cultural operator Arundhathi Subramaniam is already familiar to «Semicerchio» for her lively and authoritative contributions to the post-colonial section (see, among others, «Semicerchio» 23 [2000/2], pp. 20 and 28 [2003/1], pp. 84- 5). Since her first collection of poems, On Cleaning Bookshelves (Mumbai, Allied Publishers 2001) she has gained well-deserved recognition on the wider international scene: in 2003 she won the Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling and in 2006 she toured the UK for a series of poetry readings sponsored by the Visiting Arts fellowship. In fact, this, her third volume of poems, is published by one of Britain’s most prestigious publishers of contemporary poetry in English, Bloodaxe Books. As the subtitle promises, it includes a wide selection from both On Cleaning Bookshelves and her second volume, also entitled Where I Live (Mumbai, Allied Publishers 2005), which here becomes the sections Where I Live, How to Disarm and Another Way, while the new poems are found in the final section, Deeper in Transit.
What is unmistakable and, fortunately, not at all diminished over time, is the combination of sharp (at times even cutting) intelligence, uncompromising honesty, and probing subtlety with which this poet explores her reality. And the reality is a highly composite one, ranging from meditations on the poet’s love-hate relationship with her native city, Mumbai, as in the title poem Where I Live («I live on a wedge of land / reclaimed from a tired ocean [...] Greetings from this city / of L’Oréal sunsets / and diesel afternoons, deciduous with concrete, / betoxed with vanity / [...] where it is perfectly historical / to be looking out / on a sooty handkerchief of ocean, / searching for God») to her knowledge and experiences of the West (see, besides the signature On Cleaning Bookshelves also Another Home and Recycled). It just such writing that illuminates (at least for this common western reader, whose knowledge of Indian culture is, alas, limited) the fact that in our times the truly global perspective is offered by writers like Subramaniam, who have the privilege of knowing the philosophies and mythologies, the human and natural landscapes, the sounds, smells and tastes of both East and West.
The variety also breeds contradictions, and Subramaniam has the courage and honesty to embrace them fully. She has described the process of writing a poem as ‘learning to grope’ — writing serves her as a tool for trying out (and prying into) the changing perspectives offered by daily life, for exploring and illuminating personal and collective realities. Of the many poems that deal with writing as existential quest, a particularly fine one is the poem that closes the section of the same name, Another Way: «To swing yourself / from moment to moment, / to weave a clause / that leaves room/ for reminiscence and surprise, / that breathes. / welcomes commas, / dips and soars / through air-pockets of vowel, / lingers over the granularity of consonant, / never racing to the full-stop [...] To stand / in the vast howling, raingouged / openness of a page / [...] This was also a way / of keeping the faith».
Swinging from moment to moment, learning to live in the interval between fixities, in the continuous present that does not exist and is at the same time all that we have of eternity – this is one of the central themes of these lambent poems, which trace Subramaniam’s growing maturation and acceptance of impermanence. In a recent (June 4, 2008) interview about ‘place’ in Indian poetry, she said, «The finest poetry is able to capture this sense of ‘not quite’ and ‘somewhere in between’». Emblematic of this condition is the turtle-subject of Olive Ridley in Kolavipalam (I have always been especially excited by the poems in which Subramaniam imagines us into the subjectivity of a totally other life-form, as in this poem and in the earlier Amoeba): «and between breaths, the gaze - / unblinking, / deathless. // Ahead / it beckons - / a lurching habitat / of oceantide and dream / the promise of life / without investment / without dividend / in a salt-spangled / present continuous. // Until land beckons again. // Deliverance always / an element away».. Thus, it is totally significant that one of the most characteristic stylistic tropes in these poems is the use of nouns as verbs: «Envy. / The marrow igloos / into windowlessness. [...] The trick is not to noun / yourself into corners. / Water the plants. / Go for a walk. / Inhabit the verb» (The Strategist) or again «...I know I often long / for some warm lair [...] monsooned in grace» (Locality). While in one of several poised yet tender love poems, Lover Tongue, the poet explicitly plays off the fixity of noun against the transience of verb: «Perhaps I will tire / of your grammar, // find myself yearning / for the rumble of verb or the soft / flesh of pure vowel / those mornings when I stumble / over your landscape / of unforgiving nouns».
Beneath the irony (but there is less of this in the more recent poems) and the wry humor (e.g. «Between the doorbell / and the death knell / is the tax exemption certificate», Epigrams for Life after Forty), beneath the occasional disillusionment and disgust, we feel the urgency of the poet’s desire to explore the contrasting pulls of belonging and solitude, memory treasured and memory felt as encumbrance, nay-saying and yea-saying, form and flexibility. At the deepest level, there is the quest to understand, if not define, self — self as separate from and part of ‘other’, whether this ‘other’ be friend or family (see Sharecropping and Sister) or lover, or the social and physical place where she lives, and self in relation to the cosmic whole. Self as mind and as body, her own and her lover’s: «I tell you it’s about your quest / and your creativity / and your tuneless songs in the kitchen [...] But that’s not all. / It’s actually this – / the warm tautsoft springy irrepressible / materiality of you, // [...] the lingering isotherm / of your presence on my bed – », What Matters. And in Rib Enough: «life without ritual / would be body without ribcage. // But let there be just enough rib / between the two of us / for a rumour of edge – / frugal hint of rampart and crag – // and an ever-widening commune / of breath».. Finally, in recent poems in the last section like Rutting and Black Oestrus the body’s demands can take on an almost shocking erotic intensity: «I could swallow you [...] / ravish you / with the rip, snarl / and grind of canine / and molar, taste the ancestral grape / that mothered you, your purpleness / swirling down my gullet / and it would be a kind / of knowing // but you still wouldn’t be / me enough» (Black Oestrus).
There remains much more that deserves to be said, but that in the scope of a review like this can only be mentioned: the poet’s canny way of yoking the abstract with the physical to create descriptive passages possessing the evocative force of the exactly-right (one for all: the cityscape in Tree, «and buildings that hold sun and glass together / with more will-power than cement», a verse worthy of Frank O’Hara). Or else the way a poem can start out in humor and end in a beauty all the more poignant because initially so unexpected, mindful of the movement of a Donne song, as in the already-quoted Epigrams for Life after Forty, which dares to end like this: «And there is a language / of aftermath, / a language of ocean and fluttering sail, / of fishing villages malabared / by palm, and dreams laced / with arrack and moonlight. // And it can even be / enough».
(Brenda Porster)
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