A Traveller's Archive

And when the poetry is published at a time when mainstream publishing in India shows no signs of a seious poetry agenda, one feels justified in concluding that extra-literary considerations have clinched the issue. (Those considerations, one infers, are particularly weighty when the person in question happens to be a distinguished name in Indian advertising and theatre.)

But there are occasions when things refuse to adhere to such a perfectly reasonable scheme of poetic justice. Gerson da Cunha's book of poems, So Far, is one of them. There is nothing flamboyant about this book-no dazzling displays of technical virtuosity, no pathbreakingly experimental creative sensibility. In fact, the book evokes none of the rhapsodic expletives that so often set dust jackets ablaze.

What emerges instead, despite all one's misgivings, is a remarkably restrained, unostentatious book of poems. The voice is quiet, the craft graceful, the style minimalist, the tone urbane but never oily, confident but never brash, poised but never affected.

It is, in fact, a book of poems written by someone who doesn't have anything to prove-neither a canon to gun down, nor any desperate need to flaunt his literary credentials. It is this understated assurance that makes the book refreshingly readable.

So Far is essentially a traveller's archive. From Mozambique to Mumbai, Peru to Pachmarhi, the contexts out of which the poems arise are bewilderingly diverse. But this isn't simple 'Kodak moment' poetry either. Instead of a series of baroque vignettes of exotic locales, you get what appears to be the genuine cosmopolitanism of someone who isn't just out to display the stamped pages of his passport. There is a reflective quality in da Cunha's work, that blend of inner and outer weather that one always seeks in poetry-an ability to refract the world around without turning pat or pontifical. Nor do the distancing effects of reflection turn this into the work of a detached ironist. Despite the sparseness of the poetry, there is warmth too-the warmth of engagement with the world-and a need to make sense of places and people without easy recourse to sentiment, pastiche or glib profundity.

Perhaps one of the most striking qualities of this poetry is the ease with which it lends itself to the spoken voice-attributable perhaps in part to the author's long involvement with the stage. Consider, for instance, the easy conversational elegance of 'Hotel Garcia, Recife': "An unsuitable place really. Glaring and shadowed/wrong whatever it does, like an actress at fifty."

Da Cunha is at his best in poems that distil specific moments in a few uncluttered strokes. A delicate sense of exactitude evokes Mumbai in a single line: "hot from home/tin lunches clatter out/ under a Gothic arch." Goa is a place where the ferry waits "panting, diesel-voiced/with priest and chickens," while Gholvad is where "chikoos wear earth colours with an old nobility".

The poems that seem less successful are the few that are weighed down by generalities. There is a self-conscious programmatic edge in the poem, In the New World Slum, for example. In Bahrain, an overly-schematic poem, the alliteration trips too easily off the tongue: "the crime of Cain/provoked a prevalence of prophets/in these parts..."

And yet, in a poem like Witness to a Demolition, the particular and the general are orchestrated to a state of fine-tuned equipoise. The note of elegy at the changing landscape of the metropolis combines with an awareness of the 'power and nostalgia' that fashioned the old world.

So Far is a book with several poems you would like to return to-not least for the fact that they embody the realisation that poetic truth is more often to be found in a ripple than a splash.