The Pungency of Solipsistic Wit

Review of  After the Hard Hours This  Rain (Chandran Nair,Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975)

By Ban Kah Choon

    For those of us who remember, Chandran Nair's first book of poems (Once the Horsemen and other Poems,1972), impressed with its versatility and hard brilliance of style, a second offering of poems from any poet is another matter--readers tend to be more critical; where encouragement  is readily given the first time a more considered response usually greets the second volume.

   We are worried about the poet's development, we search for those unhealthy signs that indicate a falling into the cliched and routined and we expect a richer, mellower mood.  If we are inclined to such ungenerous thought, Chandran Nair's new volume, After the Hard Hours This Rain sets our minds at ease. Our poet is as articulately tough as ever:

these images I use are cats crouched
to jump upon birds with broken wings   (from Wet)

he tells us in his first poem.  Uncompromisingly, he views  humanity caught within the painful coil of mortality, wrenched with the loves and hates of daily toil.  But to transform the topical into poetry, the poet needs a certain distance and an ability to reflect with less of a personal intrusion.  This unfortunately, is not achieved.  Chandran emerges as an explorer and recorder of the frailities of the human spirit.  Sternly--too sternly, perhaps--he will rebuke:
  
renounce the moral agony of the bird not saved
and pull the cart of state in silence please--
words like drugs, tend to deprave.
      (from A Sage in his Cage)

   The images come too fast, immersed in the throes of local political and social upheavals, that essential developing of the image is not developed.  Yet, few poets can convey to us the pungency of solipsistic wit so strongly as Chandran Nair.  In bitter, unforgettable lines he reminds us:
  
survival beats honesty
any day
     (from The Interior Landscape of the Heart)

   He reveals the despair and unhappiness of alienated man as well:
  
at best the reasons we give ourselves
turn the millstones that grind these rocks
with cutting tongues to fine points that stab
like bearded and unkempt robbers
the journeying intellect
      (from The Interior Landscape of the Heart)

   Here is Chandran at his best--argumentative and convinced.  However reservations can be made, and again it has to do with the placing of his images.  To my mind,"unkempt robbers", suggestive as it may be, is too dependent on an intellectual grasp of its spirit, lacking the fusion of emotion and mind necessary to good poetry.

   That quote we may take to be an emblem of the inner torment of the poet and it leads the poet into the rather uncomfortable backwaters of anguish and guilt.  We have Chandran Nair's words:
  
a poem is the mind
waging war slashing canvases
into further suffering
      (from What A Poem Is)

   The poet is the persona imbibing the prophetic vision of Tiresias but bogged down by the guilt and blindness of Oedipus; there is a constant tension between hope and despair, vision and incoherence:
  
. . . a sphinx
walks the twilight land smiling
as we drown in questions of our own
      (from The Sphinx)

   To the serenity of Ajanta, the poet comes with a disturbing thought for even as the Caves offer us beauty yet "hunger has little beauty". If the poet discovers these comprehensible structure of reality, he is also trapped within his fate.

   The organising of experience through the metaphorical and figurative while it makes poetry difficult to read also enhances that fusion of subject matter, sense and style which offers a particular imaginative grasp of the world.  Consistent  synthesis in this manner is the mark of a mature poet; Chandran Nair does not always provide this but there are the nuggets which remain so that the poetry is worthwhile reading:
  
. . .tenderness as leaves unfolding into the morning light,
watched  with vengeance, seen the play
straining into the darkest night,
resisted  human growth as roots
that grow between carefully welded days,

   We are fascinated as we watch the poet 's mind  at play, assembling details into a sensuous  resonance.

   The better part of the volume deals wlth the theme of love.  They provide personal inquiries into the nature and form of Chandran Nair's  relationship with his wife, Ivy:

equating you and I
and love
     (from Equation)

   Here is where the problem of the too prominent intellect intrudes.  To a poet  of this bent, the formation of a relationship and the giving up of probing ego is not easy;  it is he tells us akin to surrender though he wryly admits, a necessary one:
  
in the end one surrenders
to belief without certainty
love without direction.
      (from Surrender)

   Where does the intelligence revealed with the other pieces lead to then, we may be tempted to ask.  However, a more positive note results from this  surrender--love tempers, proving greater control and clarity.

   The mood of love, of tenderness capture in its varying gestures introduce a mellowed, calmer note into  the hard, refractive edges of the poetry.  The title poem, "After the Hard Hours This Rain" provides the approprite metaphor:
  
sipped like some rare wine
contentment has no edge,
only a spreading warmth, love
glow gently, take your time.
you own this vineyard
now, all yours.
cask this contentment
let it mature
and never remember
the bitter taste
in other wines gone sour
    (from After the Hard Hours This Rain)

   The strength is deeper, more certain--tapping the roots and richer soils of inter-personal relationships.  The new casualness  is revelant for its simplicity underlines the delicately protective and careful attention.   Chandran's newer and richer humanity is seen best in a poem like "Some day, Ivy, the snow will seem happy again" where familiar details are deployed towards an involvement at once innocent and warm:
  
so now on this fenced-in balcony
you sit with these year old slides
letting the japanese viewer light up eyes.
with no resentment you can cry
and I can bear to feel your past happiness
melt into your anguish . . .
     (from Some Day Ivy The Snow Will Seem Happy Again)

   The most important achievement of these poems may be the appropriation of the familiar, the common aspects of life into the poet's sensibility and their transformation into a poetry which stands against the threatening chaos of alienation and spiritual dissolution.

   The poems are not everybody's cup of tea, but they deserve reading and attention.  What the volume proves is that Love is no universal panacea--that while it works in particular poems to enhance sensibility, this does not always work.  Intelligence may obscure what Love renders clear.

(This review appeared in the New Nation, Singapore, 03 Jan 76 and was written by Mr Ban Kah Choon, a lecturer in the English Department, University of Singapore.)


Poems cited in this review