Sunday, January 19, 2003		Books

A poet looks back on his life
R. P. Chaddah

Parting Wish
by Vijay Vishal. Writers Workshop. Rs 100

PARTING Wish is a collection of poems written to keep alive the memory of the poet's wife who died at quite a young age—plunging the poet's life in grief.

The book is Vishal's second collection of verse, the first one Speechless Messages appeared way back in 1992. This present collection is a collection of 36 poems. The poems revolve around various themes such as contemporary events, anecdotal wisdom, familial relationships, environmental imbalance, and muffled literary influences. Vishal writes from personal experience and his emotions come out vividly in this collection.

The eponymous poem Parting Wish recollects all the exceptional qualities that the poet's wife had "her deep devotion, her chaste emotion, her steel sincerity, a giver of joys...inching towards death, worried about my health."

The book contains poems such as Contradiction, about wastage of paper; Corporate Living, about the togetherness that ants display when faced with a difficult situation imparting to the poet "a latent lesson/in diligence/and corporate living"; and the poem limit about "Money is honey/whose sweetness Bears the after-taste/of diabetes. Speechless Message and Blue Balloon are other poems which break new ground and have something new to offer to the readers. Luckless Lass is almost a poetic rendering of the life and times of the courtesan Umrao Jaan.

Gender Bias (sons are gold/Daughters are silver) has its sequel in the poem A cycle. Mediocrity Mechanism, Rectification, Suicide Spree, Holi Hai etc. deal with subjects that are left largely untouched by modern poetry.

Poems like New Millennium, Fulfilment, To the Kargil Heroes brings to the fore the poet's reaction to contemporary events.

The last poem Searing Search suffers from the absence of precise connotations. It celebrates a new love, and in the same breath, the poet feels mired in misery and treachery. The poem echoes the many concerns the poet has dealt with in other poems. Vishal tries to relive the events in his life and is contented to round off the poem with Dreams do blossom into realities/Miracles do happen in life.

Of the many poetic devices at his disposal, Vishal opts for the Swinburnian forced alliteration:

Frivolous, foppish fashion fantasies or Decked with dishes and delicacies....Sunny, sandy shores et al. Some poems betray the proximity of the poet to Hindi and Punjabi poetry. A case in point is a stanza from the poem Fair Encounter.

A gem of injured merit/Suffering with a smile/Sensitive beyond sensitivity/Her lapsing into loneliness/Ah The book has an old-world charm, but the subjects Vishal writes about are hardly the kind touched by the modern poets of Indian English poetry. Readers who are familiar with the modern English poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra and others are not likely to enjoy this book.