The Poetry of Ranjit Hoskote

To begin I must warn all readers of this post: Hoskote is not an ideal summer read. Don't take him to the beach with you...

At least not a guy who has poems titled "Vector Geography," "Zweistromland," "Speculum," "Apostrophe to an Architect raising the City of God," "The Grammarian's Marriage Poem," "Breakfast, Interrupted by Apocalypse," to mention a few...

A bit about Hoskote from the link above:

Born in 1969, Ranjit Hoskote is a Mumbai-based poet, art theorist, independent curator and assistant editor with The Hindu. He has published three collections of poetry, co-translated Marathi poet Vasant Dahake’s work into English, and edited an anthology of fourteen contemporary Indian poets. He writes in English.

I have been reading his book Vanishing Acts which brings together older poems from his previous books, Zones of Assault, The Cartographer’s Apprentice and The sleepwalker’s Archive, and some newer poems too.

Hoskote also likes to use "difficult words and phrases," words the likes of which you remember using in your school essays to show off your newly-acquired vocabulary, only more difficult and obscure..."vatic vapors," "uncial epitaphs," "prodigal presbyope"...so bewarned…

But having said all that...his poems are to die for...well some of them at least, so rich in language and complex imagery they are...one almost feels like entering a dark, secret, sinister, magical world, a world of ancient history, of whispers, of sea and wind and monks and painters and sorcerers...

Nothing is simple, nothing straightforward...everything almost achingly overwrought and mysterious:

Corrida
(In memoriam of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez)

The bull's eye's droop in blue eclipse,
lead weighs down his cartilage;
the thick heart pumps a throb of mercury,
the nerves are a hiss of dry tongues.

Unpurged, his five stomachs rage,
red hells scourged by thorny cud;
the harrying temperatures hovers, stings,
hornet to the sentenced blood.

...

Colours for a Landscape Held Captive
(In memoriam: Agha Shahid Ali)

They never knew you, who only recall
your smashed golds and broken reds:
...And as you sang,
a starburst of paisley moths lit up
our eyes behind closed eyelids, dark cells
unlit by thought of such a dawn.

or this, from "Report of War, Kosala, 900 BC"
...
The earth is raked
by a wakeful breeze, the hills have flattened
at our conquering feet.
...
From the damp cave-roof
immemorial visitation of unsphinctered bats:
it drips like the ichor that drips
from the black god's gashed thigh.
...

or:

The got him that first hard crack
on the coconut head.
Split in sacrifice, the halves
rolled down bloody slopes,
down red shoulders, arms pinioned
in strict observance of ritual.
...
From "Assassination of an Artist," in memoriam of Safdar Hashmi.

One must not try to look specifically for any south asian themes in his poems because he does not seem to write on straight-ahead desi subjects...

Even this one, "At the Ferry Wharf, Mandovi," is deceptive...
...
Now that the bridge has fallen, the salvage crews
have trawled stories of barrage, sluice and waterfall
that the engineers could never have heard:
how could their soundings have detected
the drizzle of aboli around ruined chapels
in the night, the sharp fragrance of tulsi...
...
I came prospecting for emeralds and found a slave economy
of stone heads dangling from temple gateways:
relics of trussed victims, sandalpaste-smeared,
appointed sentries to monarch's of heaven
when Mangesh and Shantadurga came down,
bejwelled expatriates from the mountains.


He does dedicate several of his poems to Indian artists...Safdar Hashmi, Vivan Sundaram, Ram Kumar, Lal Ded, Vilas Sarang, Guru Dutt (!), Agha Shahid Ali, Anju Dodiya, Raja Deen Dayal among others...

Here are a few lines from his poem to the painter Ram Kumar:

...
And what did you hear in Banaras, Ram Kumar,
above the wailing of widows, the river's bass foghorns?
What did it breathe to you, this city shored from charnel,
its priests whirling in the blood-goddesses dance...
...
And beware: a city can die of too much faith,
mired in the apocalypse that it spawned.
...

From "Closing Act at the Old Theater," a poem to Guru Dutt [re: Kaagaz Ke Phool?], we have,
...
As in life, he stands tactfully aside
for the crowds that jostle to get their seats
in the theater; he knows the play backwards,
its the audience he's returned to watch,
the same carnival that he loved to savour
from the safety of the dress circle.
...

But it is in complex and rich images that Hoskote excels. Take this piece from his dark poem, "Noche Triste":

...
That mind, a marble veined with conceptions,
exerts itself to hold motionless this frieze
of quays, this dodging flotilla of waterfronts,
this serration of terraces...
...
Then the mind, freed from its own sepulcher
becomes a horse, with the escaped figure for rider.
Clattering by an inn of a winter's night, its hooves ignite
memories on the cobbles, memories that are not
the marble thoughts of a marble brain.
...
Or this intense, tortured description from his poem, "Helical Histories" :

Osmotic as an agora,
open to storm and tide and tread,
our bed contrives, though seamless as a skin,
to simulate our every nuance in its creases
until it folds
in one calyx our separate fires, and we forge
a ring of elbow-room and breathing space
for our wants to wrestle...

He also seems to have a feel for the sea and for that I admire him as much as Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet who manages to bring the sights, sounds and smells of the sea into his poems. From "Zweistromland" [The Land of two Streams?] written for the German painter Anselm Kiefer:

Prows snapped off, reeling ships
that have beached here in sooty dunes,
beached here, run aground miles away...

...
How long must we bleach our hulls
on these sooty dunes, pitching at
a sunrise that won't cauterize
our barnacled backs

From "Bloodlines, Songlines," for Vivan Sundaram:

The detritus of storm and fire:
in your dreams, I have seen the anchored ketch
smothered by an oil spill, its canvas sails
burning. I have seen factory stovepipes
tear ragged seams through the sky's fabric
as derricks blaze on glycerine seas.

and from "Refugee," in memoriam of the German-Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico:

Shuffling from a shore deepened by the tumult
of the sea's homecoming...
...
Scourged by the mistral, his ears mocked
by batteries of sea-pronged cannon,
he has seen his chances swim away
like black fish below the corded gangplank.
...
Those images came to rest, to rot
in the copper diving-bells of his lungs.

Hoskote's range of subjects is varied, and good for him!

He has one called "Landscape with Saints," in which he devotes a stanza each to Gorakh, Kabir, Tuka, Lalla (Ded), Khusru, Attar and Milarepa (!); there is a poem with Ghalib in it, "Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt" (Delhi 1857), which has lines like: "A pharmacist may drug himself with lyric,/ Ghalib replies, and a tiger may vanish/ in the rain-forest of his hunter's dreams./But the dry quill is a reproach and this raw winter/ could be the living tomb of my song./Send paper, my friend, these are the last pages/ of my journal I'm writing on."; several "In memoriams" that deal with particular people or events; and a wide variety of impenetrable, unclassifiable, abstract sorts.

There is one that even seems whimsically gibberish, till he tells you he is sounding out words:

Fugue

Root. Routes? Coracle. Oracle
A dry pasture. Goats. Oatmeal. Bridge.
Or ridge? Or turnip? Urn. Lip. Loose. Use?
Marvelous, isn't it the way words unravel....

If anything, Hoskote is a master of the language and employs it with alluring malleability and quirkiness. His multi-layered imagery and a certain dark, raw beauty of themes, recalls Lorca and Neruda. He mixes history, myth and heresy like Neruda and Walcott, in my opinion and has the florid symbolism of Mallarme, maybe.

Here is from a wikipedia entry about him:

The critic Bruce King writes of Hoskote's early work in his influential Modern Indian Poetry in English (revised edition: Oxford, 2001): "Hoskote has an historical sense, is influenced by the surreal, experiments with metrics and has a complex sense of the political... An art critic, he makes much use of landscapes, the sky and allusions to paintings. His main theme... is life as intricate, complicated, revolutionary movements in time... We live in a world of flux which requires violence for liberation, but history shows that violence itself turns into oppression and death." Reviewing Hoskote's first book of poems, Zones of Assault, in 1991 for India Today, the poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote: "Hoskote wants to discover language, as one would a new chemical in a laboratory experiment. This sense of linguistic play, usually missing from subcontinental poetry in English, is abundant in Hoskote’s work." A decade later, reviewing Hoskote's third volume, The Sleepwalker's Archive, for The Hindu in 2001, the poet and critic Keki Daruwalla wrote: "It is the way he hangs on to a metaphor, and the subtlety with which he does it, that draws my admiration (not to mention envy)... Hoskote’s poems bear the 'watermark of fable': behind each cluster of images, a story; behind each story, a parable. I haven’t read a better poetry volume in years."

Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on Poetry International Web, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote’s metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaceted experience." Although he was closely associated with the modernist poet Nissim Ezekiel, who was his mentor, Hoskote does not share Ezekiel's poetics. Instead, his aesthetic choices align him more closely with Dom Moraes and Adil Jussawalla.