The mind reads a poem. And then the being grasps the meaning. This is what we perceive as a pause. And thus the relationship between life and poetry moves slowly from one pause to another. This is one sort of relationship where looking inwards also goes along with phases of looking at everything around you. I mean, poetry is what connects the real with the imaginary… and when I say poetry I do not always means a babble of words hurtling at you in an unending formation. Yes, that is also poetry but so are times when you glance at a picture or lose yourself in the folds of a smile, or simply let a warm cuddle take over. What I mean is poetry comes in short spells. Even longer ones have short spells.
Talking of short spells, one book that I have been going through these past couple of months is ‘she and he’ by Astha Mittal that has these midget emotional treasures going on for well over a hundred and fifty pages. The blurb says that these lines attempt to capture the various hues, shades, and colours of a man-woman relationship. The author of these lines herself calls them quotes voicing ‘love, infatuation, attraction, attachment, detachment, the chase, the falling out of love, hurt, joy, pleasure, contentment, remorse, distance, restlessness, completeness, the incompleteness, the yearning, the memories’ and adds that this series is for ‘the love lost, for the hearts broken, for the hope that is alive, and for the belief in pure unconditional love’. The truth is that these quotes read like short poems carrying loads of meaning enough to bring about any sort of transformation that any sort of poem ever wishes to command:
He saw her dancing one night.
A non-dancer became a dancer
that night.
So I come back to the point that I made in the beginning about short spells mattering more than anything else. Even if I am reading a long poem that goes on for hundreds of lines, my mind would still want to pause after bits that transcend a mortal existence and defy any definition that words are capable of. The bits between these pause-worthy bits are lines that are keeping the entire narrative connected. For an analogy, if each word in a sentence were to be a poem that I call a short spell, then each space between these words allows the mind to appreciate that heavenly caress before the eyes move on.
As a reader scans these shorties and moves from one page to another, the feeling is that of a conversation that seeks to get under the wraps of an enigma. There is within the heart an irrepressible urge to pause and go deeper, to open up to the charged emotion expressed, and to sometimes debate and discuss the validity of a point made. The lines nudge, taunt, explain, pull, act unapproachable sometimes, and at other junctures simply lie down unclothed and willing. They are playful and naughty, hop on to become snooty and stubborn, and then glide along like a snowflake that knows it is going to change the world, for at least a short spell. And, therefore, I insist on calling these quotes, short poems. They are short but the impression lasts for a long time.
I’m still under the spell of these short poems.
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Book details:
Title: she & he
Author: Astha Mittal
Publisher: beckett Books
ISBN: 978-93-5258-179-5
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Arvind Passey
28 February 2018
