The yearning of seeds

Poetry on life and roots

Name of the book: The yearning of seeds

Auhtor: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 151

Price: Rs 199

Seeds wish to be trees and bear fruit, even palimpsest pears. This describes Kynpham’s wishes and concerns for he wants to be radical, in the original sense of being rooted, and with a poet like him even description is advocacy.

Rooted to his locale, he reaches out to the wider world and tries to come to terms with the sprouts, native or alien, friendly or belligerent. His range is impressively wide and his learning helps. He has taken considerable care in the arrangement of the poems into three distinct but not separate sections.

Over and above the meaning of the individual pieces, he wants the book to convey a general meaning or significance. He hopes the willed organicity will define his oeuvre.

‘Sundari’ from the first section — ‘the yearning of seeds’ — gives vent to a general human wish which takes on an immediacy because of the context and because of its nearness to the folk idiom and a focus, particularly in the reference to the river Umkrah. He is sad and depressed because there was nothing to do ‘but watch the grey winter sky/breeding ill will’ as ‘the timid afternoon/was slinking out like peace/from this town’ [Forebodings]. ‘Ren’, a poem based on a Khasi folk tale is simple and striking and has the poignancy of a corporate yearning:

Times have changed

Few care to listen

Many only wish to be left

To their separate dreams.

Kynpham does not seem to acknowledge the legitimacy of the wish and last lines ‘and mine always end/with alien policemen/their eyes longing/to eat us up/or if they don’t/those they protect will/an insidious infection someday could well have been left out. The staccato rhythm here and a few other pieces is more for effect than effective. It has that lurking persistence of satire that informs many of the pieces in the first two sections.

Kynpham has a ready, caustic wit and wry humour, which makes these poems lively, but his lyric genius deserves a lasting place in the sun:

Winter that sneaked into these hills

On the tenth moon has consolidated

Its stay behind the cherries.

[2]

The above lines are in stark contrast to what follows in ‘Good versus Evil’ and underlines his rich variety. There is a terse mix of folk metaphors and critical modernity in poems like ‘Rain Song 2000’.

The second section begins with the title poem for the section ‘Fungus’:

But the outside forms no part of my possession.

The heart that slithers out of its hole

To curl up in its sunshine warmth

Must risk being stoned.

These lines have immediacy and a rich hinterland of awareness, and the metaphoric expression here is terse and accurate. ‘Self-actualisation’ poses the problems of life befittingly in a prosaic manner and remains too disturbingly discursive.

My vote is for the lyric effervescence of the final section and the pieces here are sufficient witness to his genius and learning, because they spurn the unnecessary and the unnecessarily didactic.

Finally, I hail the emergence of an intelligent and conscientious poet from this tortured region of ours.

PRADIP ACHARYA

Published on December 16, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html