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Poetry review:
Summer of everything: Hope, fulfillment and rejection
Aditha Dissanayake
She looks at him and smiles. Watching her glowing eyes, he says, "a
bud of happiness sprouted" which he hopes will blossom "in the summer of
fulfillment'. End of Act I. Act II.
It is summer, they are lying on the "golden sand, gazing at the
rabbit form, of the ... moon"... she whispers... he mummers..till he
sees death on her face and realizes she is a "black swan" who grips and
throttles, who rocks him on "a dark, shadowy, violent block of
clouds...hope confronts rejection, he collapses, but not before
threatening the Damsel of Death "Thou shall not hinder, until life's
desires are fulfilled."
Did Namel Weeramuni write it that way? No. The interpretation is
entirely mine. This is the 'summer' I saw unfolding on an imaginary
stage as I read his latest work, the collection of poems titled Damsel
of Death.
"Poets, by nature, are incapable of living the unexamined life" says
the critic Melanie Rehak. "No detail is too small, no sound in the night
too muffled, to register. From this gradual accumulation of minutiae,
this keen awareness, poems emerge." Never have these words sounded so
true to me till I read the Damsel. Namel Weeramuni picks up the ordinary
events of daily life in uncanny ways and transforms them into not mere
lines of poetry but memorable 'acts' like those seen on the stage. In
the Flower Lady he sets the scene with a description of a cold winter
night
("It is seven o' clock
Embraced by darkness
She is outside...
Sky has gone to mourning...) before he asks
"Is she married to nature?
Does she not feel cold?" and provides the kind of ironic answer I
suppose only poets can come up with. She is immune to the terrible
weather because she is in a dream, surrounded by "smiling lilies" and
"their nods and nods of heads/ dancing, dancing, and dancing".
In "Hunger" he sets the stage to depict an empty, lonely kitchen.
Enter the actor. "I am bloody hungry/ nothing cooked/ pots and pans/ on
the cooker/ laughing". His shoulders sag, life ebbs out. He crumbles
into a heap groaning,
"I am tired
Oh!"
In no other poem is this celebration of daily life more evident and
dramatic than in "The Tragedy of an Ant". "An ant,black/ paddling,
paddling/ On the commode seat..." beyond which I will not comment. To
tell you more would be to give the story away. Which is not the case,
however, when it comes to the extra space the poet devotes to his wife,
Malini, whom he adores and on whose life he says, "I depend in life".
Thus, one of the best poems in the collection, and worth reciting in
full, "To My Darling Wife", "The precious one you are/the most precious
one of all/ clearest in mind and thought/ sweetest and most beautiful of
all/ Neither a ruby nor not an emerald/ But a diamond of the utmost/
that shines day and night/ In the dwelling of my heart."
The seamless flow of words evident here, though, is hard to find
elsewhere. It is missing in poems like "A Fool", "Thoughts Float on
Flight" and "For Your Return I Long", where the poet relies heavily on a
last line which jars the smooth flow of the preceding lines, to create a
bone-chilling effect.
One can almost imagine the stage lights dimming, the slow beat of a
drum, the spotlight falling on a woman standing in the centre of the
stage saying ""I think of the day that you cried/Lying by my side naked,
blood soaked/with the umbilical cord uncut." From sorrow, to joy, to
laughter. It is hard not to guffaw reading "The Conflict of Gesture".
And the best in the collection? I would say, all those short deep
verses you could easily copy onto a post-it-note and stick on your desk,
or the door of the refrigerator or wherever else you stick them on. My
favorite though, is "The Horizon Beyond". "Life is a boat/ and we
sail.../horizon is still horizon/ sail and sail/ tell me where horizon,
locates horizon...".
Here is Weeramuni, who most of us know as one of the greatest
dramatists among us, performing not on the stage, but on the page,
vignettes through which he is taking care of the ''need to make some
kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent'' (to quote
James Merrill).
The house he builds with Damsel is worth visiting because inside, you
will find not mere poetry but dramatic pieces set to provide the kind of
entertainment and enlightenment you will expect from a drama. Go watch.
aditha.
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