What
Survives Is The Singing By Shanta Acharya. Indigo Dreams
Publishing, 2020.
Review by Anita Money
Shanta Acharya’s seventh
poetry collection is dedicated to her mother for her 85th birthday. The four carefully chosen quotations on life from
Dickinson, Rilke, Bishop and Brecht have a particular power, not unlike the
refraction of light, able to amplify and alter vision so that they act as a
subtle introduction to the collection. The
title plays on Brecht’s lines ‘In the
dark times/Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing /About
the dark times. The collection, with notes at the end to give context to
some of the poems, presents a landscape still familiar, characterized by the metaphysical
and philosophical thinking that underpins Acharya’s view of life yet grounded by a very practical
awareness of the world and strong sense of irony, but there are changes: this
landscape feels older, more reflective, questions left open waiting for
response.
Her technique has
always been low key with lines that have a natural speech rhythm, in-line
rhymes and often the use of refrain, a familiar poetic device and a
characteristic of ghazals. There is experimentation with different verse
schemes and with the spacing of words (noticeably in a marathon of red images
in ‘Infinity in Red) but a predominant construction is that of two line verses,
some that carry through and others that are end-stopped. Here are two examples
from ‘In Silence’ and ‘The High Window’, the latter with a repeating refrain:
When fate deals
you a losing hand, play in silence.
Luck favours those
who mend themselves in silence.
--------
An act of kindness
never goes unnoticed,
The praise of prayer-wheels
they say is heard from
the high window
In life’s
intricate game of snakes and ladders,
Winner takes it
all, face against the sun framed in
the high window
Acharya balances her
informed understanding of the economic realities that drive politics and world
affairs with a deep sense of human suffering, injustice and cruelty. In this collection there are four poems where she adopts the persona of another woman to dramatize brutal
experiences – that of rape, murder and female infanticide in ‘Can you Hear our
Screams’; an honour killing in ‘Alesha’s Confession’; genital mutilation in ‘Ambala’ and sexual exploitation in ‘To Lose Everything’. In ‘Graffiti’
the speaker holds the hand of a dying boy who has been stabbed in retaliation.
‘The Bull Fight’
introduced with a quote from Nietzche ‘Man
is the cruelest animal…’ arouses our
instinctive sympathy for the
bulls and our admiration for the heroism, not of the matador, but of the bull. This
sense of sympathy and identification extends to inanimate objects and in
‘Umbrella’ one that has been broken and set aside takes on a feeling of
rejection:
Bent, broken, it
skulked like a skeleton
Behind the door –
an extra, never chosen to feature
centre stage, no
opportunity to show off its strong,
supple skin, open
up, let itself take wings –
be properly
forgotten on a bus or train,
venture into other
people’s homes
like its
companion, the walking stick
that went on
expeditions far and near.
Trying to come to
terms with personal injustices, disappointments and existential anxiety find
expression in a variety of poems: ‘Self Portrait’, ‘The Best is Yet to Be’, Parallel
Lives’, ‘All You Can Do’, ‘Just for Today’, ‘Where in the World Does One Find
Happiness’(after LiPo). Acharya questions her sense of self or many
selves and the feeling that she is an actor playing a part in a life that is not as she imagined, while also searching
to find her true self – ‘There’s someone in the mirror smiling at me,/the image
is mine but who is that person?’
In ‘Woodpecker’, ‘Spring
in Kew Gardens’, ‘Parliament Hill’ and ‘The London Eye’ there is engagement
with life outside her own preoccupations and she muses on history and locality.
This connection with the natural world and life around her provides emotional
light relief in the sound of birds, the sight of cherry blossom at the advent
of Spring, children learning to fly kites ‘their feet barely touch the grass
glinting in the light’ and an aerial view of London from a capsule.
Home and Exile, a
reoccurring theme in her poetry, have a dimension that goes beyond India as
home and England a second home: it is a
nostalgia for a different reality, ‘rebirth,’
‘a world elsewhere’ where one feels at
home, free from disappointment and alienation.
Home is not a
country or postcode,
more a state of
mind, keeper of the map of my world-
offering a hint of
the distance between myself
and the silence
out there, the way life reaches
for light, and
rays leaning like ladders against the sky
invest my journey
with meaning. (from Home)
In the following
lines from ‘Homecoming’ God is addressed:
Don’t know why I
presume you might listen
more carefully to
my entreaties in a foreign land?
I am the one on
holiday, not you –
such are the
limitations of the human mind.
Talking to you,
sharing my thoughts, I keep thinking
you will respond,
talk to me through your silence………
My loneliness has
led me back to where I’d begun.
I’ve nowhere else
to go, don’t turn me away
on another journey
of self-discovery for I am done.
Compare these
lines with ‘The Art of Ageing’ where we are given a list of instructions on
coping:
Let the young and
foolish fume and rage,
Preserve your
energy for life’s endless surprises…….
When you pray no
point in thanking the Lord
For all the things
He hasn’t done, or repenting
For the things you
have. If you haven’t been heard
In all these
years, do not take it personally.
There may or may
not be a reason for everything.
Keep an open mind,
but don’t be afraid to hold on
to what you
believe. Develop a sense of the
absurd.
Both poems,
humorous in different ways, have a serious message. There is an ambiguity that reflects the
mysterious and unpredictable reality of existence, the question of belief and
the challenge of holding on to a belief against the odds of silence.
Family and family
bonds are another major theme and she sees interesting correspondencies in the
movement of rivers. In ‘Relationships’
she speaks of
daughter mother
grandmother great-grandmother
Linking us all the
way back through time
celebrating the
journey memories of places
travelled together
apart shared
flowing from the same glacier
head of the soul
mountain to a drop in the ocean……..
A slip of a stream
growing into a river with tributaries becomes an image of motherhood in ‘Find
Your Level’: ‘The memory of her mother’s
songs echoes / in her veins as she flows into the sea…’
What provides
resolution is the recognition of her personal need to write and the human
instinct for poetry. There are several
poems on the subject: ‘Why Some People Read Poetry’ (after W.S Merwin), ‘Why Some People Write Poetry’ but also ‘Less is
More’ ‘Not Knowing’ and ‘The High Window’.
In ‘Words’
she celebrates the creative impulse and
sense of relief in finding the words to make a poem, hoping the poem will
travel the world, connect with others:
imagine your
creations rising like suns
On the shores of
continents of strangers,
networks of
neurons connecting the universe.
The joy is all
yours, nothing’s the same anymore –
Not the past,
present, not even the future.
The image of a
river entering the sea and these lines of Acharya’s return me to the title of
this collection and remind me of that famous line from Auden often
misunderstood because pulled out of context:
For poetry makes
nothing happen, it survives
In the valley of
its making where executives
Would never want
to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of
isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we
believe and die in: it survives
A way of
happening, a mouth.
The singing taken in its broadest sense is about the human capacity for suffering and celebration, for lifting the mortal spirit above desolation, and this life affirming capacity is what the poet voices on behalf of humanity.
Anita Auden Money is an educator based in London. She is a frequent contributor to Re-Markings. Her conversation with Re-Markings is being featured in the forthcoming issue of Re-Markings www.re-markings.com
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