A wordsmith at work
Shalini Rawat

Pursuit of Meaning
by Rakshat Puri.
Sterling Publishers Pvt Ltd.
Pages 188. Rs 300.

"Poetry is an ascetic art of doing without, rather than doing with indulgence". R. Parthasarthy

In the cold desert nights of the mind, a fire rages within. Seated in front, it is a poet with a hooked pen. His fingers move nimbly, gathering a word-stitch from an earlier word-stitch, going over the meanings, sounds and silences over and over again, crocheting the before and the now, the clouds, the wind and the moon together, till a poem-pattern emerges. His subject universal, his concerns primal, Rakshat Puri is not your regular poet-performer. Much as his journalistic writings talk loudly of the here and now, his poems, born of the silence within, crave silence and spread silence.

Most of these beautiful poems simply exist—like the blue ice lakes in mountains for which recognition and admiration are immaterial. If you get an opportunity to savour them with all your senses, the benefit is all yours—the lake-poems couldn’t care less. For years, these wanderer poems roamed in literary journals worldwide. They now appear bound in this new volume, which promises to make you see images and sounds in words where none existed before.

Writing in free verse is like taking a rambling walk in the woods—a breaking twig, a rustle in the bush, the dappled light—even your own footfall, aid in the magic of discovering yourself again, for all poetry is discovery and not invention. Whereas putting words into a planned, metered representation brings order and discipline to the most profound thoughts, no straying from the track much as the woods cast their spell. Rakshat’s poems are a journey of discovery with the magic intact. The prologue’s ending couplet declares vividly: ‘All words know all poems must go/Along the river’s destined flow.’

The opening poem Saying impresses with its sudden rush of words tumbling over each other to be the first to catch a meaning and convey it remind you of Donne for the sheer force and stamina of the metaphors hurled at you. From then on you know that the poet is going to lead you to the edge of a precipice, where you shall be introduced to Nature in its raw form and will have to grope your way through the metaphysical questions on his mind.

Here the bygone ages rest in canyons where ‘history greys’ and a river like the ‘Indus moves through turns in memory/Simple as a folk song’. The seasons are captured in equally unusual metaphors as compared to the usual bittersweet wordplay that passes for poetry, e.g., in April, ‘Water in the air, sprays/Of red, orange, blue-green bring/The rainbow down’. So too for the sensuous rains where ‘The monsoon’s tambourine rumble/Echoes in gardens that once/I lost and found/In the electric arc of union.’

The days and nights languish in the eternal recesses of the mind and you may ‘See then the dream pass by nightly on the river/And rest, knowing there’s forever and also never.’ However, sometimes this very abstraction becomes a distraction and sentences compress in excess, so that all the sweat that goes to ‘Beat words to endless shape in metal and stone’ is lost. Some poems run away with meaning altogether so you have to patiently deconstruct his poetry a long way before you find a door.

The poet’s penchant for peppering his poetry with alliterations prises it from platitudes, e.g., ‘the sun’s savage stallions career to summer’ or ‘Slow in the swoon and sweat/Of summer afternoon.’ Impermanence permeates the soul of the book. Time is the speculator and the object of speculation too, e.g., ‘`85hope’s gilded monument/Is clay beneath the sun’s silver ascent’ or ‘Every season has blown where Time now blows/The pain-packed thorn to pair with the bliss-rapt rose.’ But the garnishing is never at the cost of the prophet in him, e.g., ‘Absence re-forms as presence/Every departure spells arrival somewhere’ or When time was not, nor was a was/Nor is and will-be, did movement pause’ or ‘Conviction, not lies, is the risk to truth.’ Before I give away too much of a good thing, go buy the book.

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