Ranjan M Amarasinghe - his poems I like

K S Sivakumaran

I like Ranjan Amarasinghe’s personal poems. His new collection A Crisis of Civilization has 50 poems he has written very recently. He has been writing poetry for a long time. In 2005 his first publication appeared as The Spectre of Aggression. This second book is published by S Godage and Bros.

He has worked as a journalist with the defunct Sun, The Island, and a few other papers. His experience as lecturer in Journalism in Zambia and a tutor of English has contributed to his awareness and experience. It must be recalled that in 2010 the Department of Culture awarded him the second place for this collection from open English manuscript of poetry in a competition.

My purpose here is to discern the poetic style of his writing that brought to me pleasure. I looked for freshness of thought and feeling that identifies his individual talent and his adherence to tradition.

I shall therefore choose at random some of the lines appreciated from the little poems he has composed.

Look at the concluding lines in his poem ‘Bonfires’
‘I am living in a fool’s paradise
Trying in vain
To quench my thirst
For the bubbling youth
Forgetting the uncertain future
And proposing a toast
For the exhilarating gleam of today.’

Reading this me too an aging man sees that there is wisdom in these lines. Rightly Robert Frost said ‘Poetry begins with delight and ends in wisdom’. There is a positive note: And proposing a toast / for the exhilarating gleam of today. See how the poet concisely and effectively expresses his feelings of boredom in middle age in the second half of his poem ‘A New Vision’ ---

‘I feel rejuvenated
Vanquishing the demons
Of piercing silence
Brewing numbing
Loneliness
Suddenly
Life gleams with a new
Meaning
And I croon a love song
Forgetting the melancholy
Feeling
Like a child joyously flying
A multi-coloured kite
Triumphantly annihilating
The nagging boredom’

Most of his poems end with a positive note and his true feelings are sincerely registered in the poems. This is established further in the last few lines in his poem titled ‘Summing Up’---

‘All things considered
I must humbly declare
Life as an affirmation
To be fervently, cherished
With uncompromising and
Unbounded relish’

Understandably the poet the poet is influenced by the poets of fame of the last century like W H Auden or T S Elliot or D H Lawrence some of the famous American poets in terms of the tone and direct use of uninhibited feelings and coinage of different types of phrases and poetic sensibilities. His personal experiences, dreams and thoughts are also internally analyzed by the poet to end his poems with realistic and positive conclusions. Although there is a kind of self-pity is seen through in his narrative it evaporates at the end.

In that way the poet escapes from being mundane He avoids being preaching or moralizing or exaggerating anything. His personal poems therefore are not exclusively his own peculiar oddities but universal experiences I was seeking to read Amarasinghe’s public or poems with political slogans but I failed to see any strong renderings on those lines.

However there is one poem that could be mentioned as an erotic sensation set in a foreign clime and which is apolitical. Here it is titled ‘A Bohemian Rhapsody---

‘I must confess
That I never checked-up
My destination
Before the long winding – flight
FROM THE WORLD MAP
Awaiting blissfully
A smooth touch –down
At the imposing air-port
Of Lusaka
Greeting me with hand-shakes
By smiling Zambian officials
Who took me
As a spectator
To witness a rare sight
Of spectacular dance troupes
Swaying erotically
And in unison
To the rhythmic
African drum-beat
And I was transformed
Instantly
Hugged and loved
By enigmatic and fun loving
African damsels
To worship, jocularly
Hitherto unknown
God of Eros’

There are a few more poems of the poet’s personal experiences in the Dark Continent and then we come to his long title poem that did not particularly fascinate me because the poet now turns his attention to perhaps sense of conservatism. But then the last few lines underline an urgent necessity in our little island which is ---

‘Provided you pay
Due respect to
The all encompassing concept
Of morality
In which hinges
Undoubtedly
The well being of
Our whole civilization
And more importantly
Our own survival.?

In his poem ‘War and Peace’ the poet focuses on the ‘ruthless forces of Terrorism’, but fails to understand that it was not a one way street.

I like this couplet—Life
‘A half-burnt candle street
Abruptly dies with spasms’

The remaining poems are also as interesting as the earlier poems mentioned. Typographical errors and an oversight in repeating the poet’s name for every poem that t followed could have been looked into. The cover design by Godage Emporium is also appreciable.

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