Book review: St Cyril Road

(First published in the Indian Express, February 2005)

This wasn't an adequate review; barely a summary of salient points. There was a great deal to say about the relative absence of poetry on the bookshelves, and with more space I'd have liked to have taken a closer look at the very different ways in which Chaudhuri and Kolatkar deal with neighbourhoods. Both Kala Ghoda and St Cyril Road revolve around what in criticspeak is called a sense of place, but that's where the resemblance begins and ends... might come back to this some day when there's less white noise in my life.

St Cyril Road And Other Poems
Amit Chaudhuri
Penguin Viking
Rs 200, 78 pages

“To want to be not an Indian or English
poet, but simply a ‘poet’ like the others,
to be undivided from them by class and geography,
those other languages within language,
as I believed them fundamentally
undivided from each other…”

Perhaps these lines from ‘Memorabilia’ are the key to Amit Chaudhuri’s poems. Here is an articulation of his aspirations, to be part of “the great equality conferred by the bookshelf”, measured only by the worth of his writing, not by his rank, position and place in the card catalogue of writers. Here, too, is the gulf between image and representation, the clunky lines and awkward rhythm unable to do justice to a poet’s desires.

St Cyril Road and Other Poems is an unusual collection of poetry from a prose writer often praised for the poetic quality of his prose. It bears the stamp of poems written in Chaudhuri’s youth when he intended to be not just a writer, but a poet; and the more private watermark of poems written at a stage when he had become the writer, poems not meant for publication. And it has the hallmarks of his prose work: his ability to store away apparently unremarkable moments and images and illuminate them in recollection, his love for the mundane over the extraordinary, the connections he makes between language and music.

A painting on the wall of a room in India becomes the starting point of a journey into England—“Growing up and taking the trouble to see the real thing/ hasn’t diminished the village, its heart as full/ of sleeping resonance as the unstruck church bell.” His mother and her music teacher create “something liquid and grieving”, “through the clear archway of notes”, a “mortal moment” shadowed by an impending but as yet unsuspected death. ; The sting of Old Spice; frost on a Mercedes-Benz; the mud-like stain on toilet paper, too dark to blend in with the “pale shit” of the English boys; the place in all conflicts but especially in Gaza, “between the kitchen and the garden and the wall and the barbed wire”. Revelation can come from anywhere, in Chaudhuri’s muted but vivid world.

For all that, St Cyril Road suffers from inwardness; Chaudhuri’s world is deeply internal, implacably personal, despite the stray poems here on war and Kashmir and violence. It is unfair to compare two poets as different as the late Kolatkar and Chaudhuri, but Kolatkar’s cycle of Kala Ghoda poems has all the vitality, the force that this collection lacks. St Cyril Road is important for readers in search of the quiet moment, or readers who want to trace Chaudhuri’s development as a writer in love with language. And it is an important book for Chaudhuri to have published; it takes some courage, after years of being identified as a prose writer, to stake claim to the poetry that was his first love. But this is too slight a collection, its impact too mild, to establish Chaudhuri as a major poet. He has staked his claim; perhaps a second collection, less haphazard, more intense, will consolidate it.

Nilanjana S Roy