At the book launch: Full Disclosure - Anthology by Manohar Shetty

Poetic meditation and conversation with Manohar Shetty

A Poet Comes Clean - Thoroughly enjoyed the meditation & ultimately the literary dialogue with Manohar Shetty on his latest anthology "Full Disclosure"

A Poet Comes Clean

To read a collection of works of a poet is akin to reading his personal diary. Such is the experience when you read Manohar Shetty’s anthology of poems in his new book ‘Full Disclosure’. The collection (300 odd pages of heightened modern verse) contains eight volumes of previously published poems and a handful of recent poems. This publication is special, as much for the accessibility of a large part of Manohar’s work, as is his trajectory from the early 80s to present times. Covering a span of four decades, one finds Manohar evolve from matters of love, environment and home that trouble the young mind to more geriatric themes of ageing, loneliness and death.

The introduction is by the eminent late British poet Landeg White, who begins his comment with the following lines: “To watch Manohar Shetty take the podium at a poetry reading is instructive. Previous poets have left the audience soporific, but when Shetty begins reading, they spring to life. There’s just something in the authority of the diction and rhythm that immediately compels that this is genuine stuff.”

Remarkable in their steadfastness, Manohar’s poems seek the immediate and the personal. The microcosm of his intimate space, morphs into the universal in the poems. Bruce King (a towering figure in modern literary criticism) calls Manohar’s poems art forms. In his book ‘Modern Indian Poetry in English’ he writes - “his poems bring to light otherwise unshaped, often inarticulate, deeply introspective feelings.”

The hallmark of a poet is that he lives a life subsumed in reality and mines simple truths from it; enveloped by solitude so profound that he has the facility to hold a magnifying lens to the nooks and crannies of the surrounding world. At this Manohar is artful as he discerns the arriviste and the insouciant in his vicinity as also psychological shadows of prosopopoeia ‘for the condemned man in his cell’ or the menace of death that ‘grows in your coffin like a toenail.’

‘Guarded Space’, his first book of poems begins with ‘Fireflies’. Manohar deftly juxtaposes innocence and experience and echoes William Blake’s poems ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’. Gay fireflies like ‘flashing streamers’ or ‘wavering lanterns’ ‘stare like luminous dials’ when bottled by children. ‘Worried by coarse hands, the walls of glass’ they soon ‘wilted to lifeless specks’. The child poet didn’t feel much then - a small loss of a ‘boy’s ornament’.

But now,

Travelling my daily groove

In the hunt for food and habitat,

I remember their trapped blank lights.

In ‘Legacy’, a sheaf of love poems, Manohar dwells upon the man-woman relationship – a miasma of conflicting emotions, where love mingles with lust, filial relationship, sexual violence, hate and lacerations. These lines from ‘Foreshadows’ delineate the first flush of tender love, enmeshed with lust.

Waiting for the shy click of heels

on the stairs, I watch a deep

forest rise from my hands

to be soon enmeshed by lust and devouring tendencies.

A faint smell of musk enters

as I lope across the wall

My mouth exposes hungry tusks

and hands reach out like paws…

And then ‘Moored’ in a quintessential Souza-esque style of painting couples, does them in; the chafe, graze, scratch, rasp… 

They lie tied to swirling beds.

Toss in the restless darkness.

Cupped brows chiselled

For movement. They

Lurch closer, bodies chafe

And whisper, wince at each

Touch of the wind.

Shifting the lens to the brilliant craft of the poet - the marked economy, understatement and visual shape of the poems. The form is stanzaic, and lines appear to have regular length except for a few exceptions. Intermittent use of internal rhymes imparts rhythm, and rarefied poetic diction lends richness to the verse. The reader is compelled to reach for the dictionary, to reinforce the syntax and mot juste in his poetry. His metaphors are a delight to perceive and assimilate. They linger with the reader long after the poems have been read and put away.

Ants

Bodies like puffed rice,

Jaws grinding busily,

The swaying swollen heads

Lifting in flanked procession

The palanquin of flesh.

Animal poems form a large part of Manohar’s canvas. It’s interesting to behold that the technique is a synthesis of DH Lawrence and Ted Hughes, two major English poets who used animal imagery in their works to comment on the human condition. Ted Hughes wanted to write about the ‘crowness of the crow and the foxiness of the fox.’ Manohar sometimes brings in the mythic and ferocious lens of Ted Hughes to bear upon his animals. At other times, he uses a softer note, depicting them in their natural forms much like DH Lawrence.

Sting

The honeycomb is what

We are, an amphitheatre

Of geometric cells

Droning to an

Audience of one—

Head swaying like a wand,

The imperious queen

With a sweet tongue

Listening in, wings

Rippling in applause,

And killing us off

One by one.

Praying Mantis

her face

A swaying

Equilateral

Triangle like an

Alien’s, her

Panoramic

Quizzical eye

Rolling round for

A suitable partner.

His progression is structured and not necessarily linear. In no time an image that he begins with offers unconventional emotion through association. If ‘The faces drifting like apparitions’, has connotations of the precise imagism of Ezra Pound; ‘His face etched against the decay that rose and crammed the entire mirror’ leans towards Oscar Wilde’s, Picture of Dorian Gray. In his poem ‘Floorshow Bombay’ – ‘Smoke-screened sighs escape/From the redly-lit audience when she bends/Crabwise instead’, becomes a Mario Miranda painting and ‘Powdered labourers wait in a queue’, a Raghuvir Singh photograph. These are just some of the many examples of synaesthesia at work is his poems.

In the footsteps of Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Lexis Local’ is the poet’s exploration of evocativeness of Indian English idiom in poetry. Landeg is so taken in by the sound of it; he encourages Manohar to continue this experiment where the focus of attention is not the accent and stress but the entire syllabic length.

For Emily and Mahess it was,

As they are saying, love at first sight.

Self–portraits are revelatory, highly instructive and intimate. Human relationship to mirrors rides a layered love/hate crest and trough wave-like pattern. But, Manohar’s lens remains steadfast and clear on self, through elevated and despairing life strokes. His humility and introspective spirit is ferocious, pinning down tints and fractures alike.

In my drinking days, I never slept,

Only passed out and woke up

My eyes red as Mars, my head

A rattling alarm clock, amnesiac

His later poems smell of nostalgia, ‘when Macintosh was a raincoat and email a shade of blue. Inkpot, quill and curlicue longhand’ the ubiquitous writer’s companions. Fondly he recalls black/berries picked up on/a remote forest trail.’ He laments the obscurity of real scholars today contrary to the facility of the click of a mouse, which makes a dozen stand tall.

I bow sadly to my young

Charges and their instant knowledge

Borrowed with a simple click

Of a button from a universe

So ably charted and empirically

Established by my peers

And their prophetic wisdom.

Ensconced in deep thought he then begins a meditation on old age, a heavier step and a presence linked to absence. A deliberation not born of anger, injustice or pulsating fervours but slow observation –and a fierce scrutiny. The poet dwells on different ways of dying and is bewildered by the syndrome of people passing away, ‘without so much as a, take your leave.’

Blown away by Camus

And Neruda and on the road with

Ginsberg and Kerouac

Now his heartbeats are the falsetto

Of a goods train on a creaking

Bridge over a river rank with

Debris.

Cosy, intimate conversations with himself and his first family continue interspersed with birdy, snaky and spidery dialogue. Imbuing his verse with poetic fallacy, Manohar interprets the meaning of nature bringing ever new perspectives into folds of human comprehension. “Poets are natural born schizoids/And psychoanalysts/Have no answer to them.” His homilies, asides and marginalia presented between long verses are home truths, which jolt the reader with their stinging quality.

I don’t know the meaning

Of such homilies

As united we stand

Or we’re all

Part of a family.

Even the lamb

Is alone in its

Death rattle.

He made Goa his home in the mid-80s but didn’t write poems on Goa for a long time after settling here. With time the alienation abated, he felt better and ‘Returning home after a difficult day’, he wove poems around the Goan landscape, ‘the drifting wisp of thought and image…snatched miraculously from mid-air and made palpable on paper.’

Mining Gallery, Goa

We’re the avant-garde

Landscape designers

Leaving for posterity

A palette of red ponds,

Freshly dug earth

Sculpted into bald hills

And lunar ravines

The ream of new verse at the end of this anthology signifies that heart and hearth will keep fuelling Manohar’s diary writing and he will continue to show his readers the way towards some resolution of their inner scape in relation to reality.