‘Bombay poets’ have always reigned on the scene of Indian English poetry, and now a fresh voice, Rochelle Potkar, has emerged from the same territory carrying the legacy of poets like Nissim Ezekiel and Adil Jussawalla.
Potkar’s latest collection of poems, Coins in Rivers, offers a pulsating visualisation of variegated modern realities with a tinge of dismay and defiance. And these modern realities turn into a rich tapestry of recurrent poetic themes that include the angst of women, political dictatorship, patriarchy, love, war, memories, and nature. Coins in Rivers thus carries a deeper sense of contemporariness where the poet explores the world through her personalised poetic vision.
These poems do not afford delightful swoons or lyrical pleasure, but disconcertingly compel the reader to meditate on the unsettling truths of human society. And they drill into the deeper layers of consciousness. For instance, the poem, ‘In the Land under the Sun’, poses a disturbing question — why have women always been relegated and confined to the “wife’s kitchen” and without the refuge of poetry? As onions shrivel in our pockets with intense upheaval/ men use Urdu and Marathi verses to fight God/ and the women can’t even fight the men/ who are not their husbands/ because they know no poetry.
Drawing bigger ideas
Potkar’s poetry reflects a unique compactness as she does not misspend a single word, and mostly, her words seem to be drawing images of bigger ideas, inviting the reader to immerse in them. That compactness may sometimes veer towards extreme obscurity and diminish the joy of reading. But her intensely striking imagery transports the reader into the world of her poetry: swaddled in a smocked blanket/ he scrunched his face/ like a torn rope from the sky/ opening his mouth/ and wept.
Poet and author Rochelle Potkar
Other noteworthy aspects of her poetry are her deceptively sharp language and staunchly colloquial diction. Convoluted sentences find no place here, and she is best at her directness of poetic expressions. However, sometimes she uses a playfulness of language with a sleight of hand and presents a serious idea in a wry tone as in the poem ‘Bedding Day’. Here, she takes a jab at Indian patriarchy, whereby an unlettered man marries a virtuous educated girl who cannot be tamed by him: Her good name Priya/ from top cawlej, tonty-two or tonty-one/ with a dowry of ten thousand dollas.
Some of the poems in the collection appear too esoteric and ambiguous and demand an extra effort from the reader. However, shifting between mirth and grimness, Coins in Rivers delivers the poems with a rich array of themes that makes it a gravitating read.
The reviewer teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia University.
Coins in Rivers
Rochelle Potkar
Hachette India
₹450
Published – September 05, 2024 10:12 am IST
