Cyclones from silence

A year back, literary agent Kanishka Gupta, in an article for Scroll.in, identified five independent publishers of poetry, which also included Manu Dash, founder of Dhauli Books. “As mainstream publishers get more stringent with their lists, independent presses have stepped in to fill the gap and to give opportunities to up and coming poets,” wrote Gupta. Dhauli Books and The Dhauli Literary Trust, which recognises the best poetry collection in any language each with the Jayadeva Poetry award, have indeed stepped into the void left by bigger publishers. A cursory glance through their webpage shows publications of several new and established writers. Now, Dash has brought out the book under review — his fourth poetry anthology — from his home publisher.

Dash is not a new writer. Besides books of poetry, he has written fiction, edited anthologies, translated extensively and also ventured into non-fiction. He is the curator of the annual Odisha Art and Literature Festival. As a young man, he was an active member of the anti-establishment Anam Writers’ Movement, on which the government clamped down during the Emergency (1975-1979). Many of the poems in this collection are tinged with the sepia tint of nostalgia, loss, and experiences. Each poem is also stamped with the economy of phrases and images that one might expect from a poet whose career spans nearly half a century.

For instance, the poem, “On Meeting a Friend at Konark After 46 Years”, which begins: “Our appearance hazy, / No blood memory / To nudge our clean shaven faces / While we exchanged the litany on family members / Who had died over the past fifteen years / Our parents’ cloudy faces appearing at the top.” One of the essential experiences of growing old is the list of people one knows who had died. The other is uncertainty of the future: “There could be a super cyclone / Or a tsunami.” With great craft, Dash welds the image of natural disasters — which have grown so common with climate change — with loss.

A Brief History of Silence | Author: Manu Dash | Publisher: Dhauli Books | Pages: 80 | Price: Rs 295

Cyclones have been common in Dash’s native Odisha and they frequent his book as well. In one poem, simply called “Cyclone”, he writes: “The cyclone is an unclaimed industry / Producing the adrenaline of hope / For the space of assault we inhabit.” This is a reference at once to the natural phenomenon as well as a personal storm. Another poem, titled “Super Cyclone”, begins: “A wound swells up / Somewhere in the dark recess of memory.” It goes on to describe the “industry” of a cyclone: “Scamsters have joined / Hands for their own greater good. / Stranded at bypass roads, / The relief trucks are no longer seen”. There is hope, yes, but also the recognition of individuals in the face of such overwhelming calamity.

The final poem of the book, “A Parable on Cyclone 2019”, refers to Cyclone Fani — the strongest to strike the region since 1999 — that hit the eastern seaboard in late April-early May. While the state government and disaster authorities were praised in the international media for being able to accurately predict its landfall and prevent loss to human life, Dash has an entirely different take on it. “The cyclone visited our bucolic region,” he writes. “It drops in more often than taciturn politicians do / At their constituencies.” 

A little later, he goes on to describe the ritual of politicians surveying the damage: “The PM surveyed the distressed stretch as scheduled / The CM issued an appeal everyday counselling to / Maintain peace as scheduled, / The people were subjected to inexorable sufferings as scheduled.” The poem and the book end with the poet staring into the abyss of the night sky in the eerie peace that follows a cyclone: “the parable is nothing but the spasms of common cruelty.” The book begins with an epigraph from Neruda’s “I Like It When You Are Silent”: “For you are like the night, still and constellated / Your silence that of stars, so distant and so simple.” At the end of the book, one is left wondering if the poet admires this silence or rejects it. But that poetic liberty we can surely allow him. 

The writer’s novel, Ritual, will be published later this year