The word from the stream

By the end of Dom Moraes' life, it had become an axiom in some circles to acknowledge the greatness of his talent while lamenting the relative smallness of what he did with it.

There was the early brilliance that won him the Hawthornden prize for poetry, at an age when most poets, however gifted, were still struggling with the rhymey-dimey stuff; there were the long years of drifting and drinking, of broken marriages presided over by his mad mother's ghost; there were the years of drought when poetry deserted him; and then there was the cancer that finally silenced him two months ago.

It was easy to construct a simple myth around Dom: the myth of the poet blessed and cursed by a fickle muse, the writer who "cupped sounds in his hand", whose "words came/tamely as birds to him". But to mummify him in this myth would be to ignore the work that was Dom's true flesh-and-blood, to turn away from his poetry.

In 'Autobiography' (1957, from A Beginning), Dom made a claim that could only have been made by the very brilliant and the very young: "I have grown up, hand on the primal bone, Making the poem, taking the word from the stream, Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone."

In the years after that dazzling beginning, he would lose some of those battles to a variety of silences. The hawks and unicorns, the minotaurs and vipers, the gulls and cobras that formed a bestiary marching through his work took wing, were slaughtered, slithered away into a silence that lasted for almost twenty years. By 1967, just ten years after the Hawthornden, a kind of exhaustion had slipped into his work:

"I am tidying my life
In this cold, tidy country
I am filling a small shelf
With my books."

And later, looking back, he wrote of the spaces between the early promise and the long silence that shadowed his life: "Words wouldn't come, but money hadn't yet/caused me such trouble that I couldn't write."

To younger poets, Dom in full flow was a colossus: Dom silent was still to be genuflected before, still far worthier of homage than most of his contemporaries in India. Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawala: of course there were other poets, but these three had overlapping lives and shared the territory of the "island" of Mumbai. Dom had the most uneasy relationship of the three to India; he belonged, but he didn't; he knew the people, but not the languages; he went elsewhere, but always returned.

The myths he returned to were not often of this country. He revisited Arthur far more successfully than he dealt with Babur; wrote slightly awkward poems about gladiators, or about figures drawn from Norse saga. (Though even here, in "Barrows", Dom's gift was unquestioned: "There's a funny smell in the corner/And something with red eyes watching/Father, I'm really quiet./Please can I come out?)

Dom returned often enough to the figure of the winter king""disturbingly mingled, in John Nobody (1960) with the cartoon figure of Santa Claus:

"The trampling reindeer smelt him where he lay, Blood dyeing his pelt, his beard white with rime."

That was from Christmas Sonnets, which continued in the same holiday spirit:

"The spraddled turkey waited for the knife
The scything holly clashed; the pleading peal
Of bells swung Christ back on a horny heel
To clutch the cross like a desired wife."

His poetry was dark with the knowledge of violence, and with a deeper scouring of the soul than most of us would care to have experienced. His years as a war correspondent seeped into his poems: "In my time I have been in many countries/In every one I watched the children's eyes."

And he created three figures of great personal significance who inhabited his poetry with the same unwavering fidelity to him as did the figure of his mother ("From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy,/glare down like a gargoyle at your only son.").

These were Craxton, a butler who fed his master daily bowls of blood; Fitzpatrick, rising from the sea to show Dom the marks of crucifixion, Beldam, a WWI cavalry officer whose decomposed hands scrabble at his grave, searching for a way out. They joined his menagerie, that collection of beasts and demons whose flesh was made word by Dom.

But as the poems in Typed With One Finger demonstrate, Dom did find peace in his last decades, with Sarayu Ahuja-architect, companion, and fellow writer. Their relationship began badly"""Because you have a family, I a wife/little deceptions fill the whole of life"""but what they had wouldn't let go.

"Perhaps we have misplaced our yesterdays,/and only what we now possess survives./It seems, though we for years went separate ways,/that we have been together all our lives." These weren't the best lines Dom ever wrote, but they rank among the gladdest.

Glad as I am to have Collected Poems, Dom deserved a final tribute that was less perfunctory. Though the selection of poems from Dom's works has been carefully carried out, these are more accurately selected poems rather than the complete collected works that the title might lead you to expect.

And a poet of Dom's stature deserved more detailed commentary""an essay by a fellow poet on his work would not have been out of place. For most readers, the poetry itself will ensure that Collected Poems is adequate; but not, unfortunately, definitive.

COLLECTED POEMS: 1954""2004

Dom Moraes
Penguin
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 355