The place where slippage is a state of being
View(s):Malinda’s Seneviratne’s latest collection of poetry, Edges, is characteristic of Seneviratne the poet. Seneviratne the poet is barely recognisable in the Seneviratne the public encounters in his garb as editor in chief or political columnist. His poetry has always been the penmanship of a clever mind responding to and recording the world of human encounters and emotions that political ideology, jargon or stance cannot find ways to articulate and understand.
“There are things in this world that are clearly defined,” writes Seneviratne in his preface to the book, which to him, are the things that have been “named and names agreed upon.” Yet, to him, the world is also made of scramble and of the constant process of amalgamation and scattering. When this happens, the lines at the perimeter of definition become arbitrary, human-made and subject to error, a reality Seneviratne possibly encounters daily in his life as a columnist and editor. He admits that these arbitrary lines prove useful. Yet, he knows all too well that the poet emerges, lives, thrives and creates, only on the other side of that line. Beyond that line nothing is solid and anyone who crosses it stands on liquid ground, where, he says, “slippage is the state of being”. There you need to stay in motion if you don’t want to slip on “sound and silence.” Yet, this motion produces, at least to the poet, its own words and thoughts. Edges is the collection of poems, Seneviratne says, that he transcribed when, “That movement yielded words in particular configuration.”
There are 81 poems in this small book that has been perfectly designed by Sandra Mack, to capture the emotional tears and rips that overwhelm the reader as she progresses through the poems. The poems flow quickly, one following the other, not offering the time for quiet meandering in their pace and rhythm, for after all, as Seneviratne says, if you do not move you will slip and fall. Personally, I wish there had been fewer poems in the whole collection. 81 poems of such distilled intensity can overwhelm and glaze the senses if one is not careful to take the book, poem by poem, in ever small doses at a time. A large number of poems can result in the same outcome that Seneviratne mentions in his poem, the Review, “and in the end/ when player has gone/ camera rests in case/ everything has been said/and perhaps nothing too.” Yet, that is no doubt, the result of stepping beyond the edge, where in the need to stop oneself from falling on that fluid ground, he needs to keep moving, and in the process, words that emerge are of a particular configuration that are both sound and silence at the same time.
In Edges, the place beyond human-made lines is primordial and its defining characteristic is its absolute nakedness. In the first poem of the book, “Rawness”, our “proper noun” existences, of convention and taught-truth are limited to our daily outer coverings: make up, practised smiles and sanctioned feeling. It is when we strip ourselves of these that we are reduced to a primal state where we are “fear-made”. However, fear is not the only state that opens up in this “naked” absoluteness.For, he says, we are also, “hope-made”. This is Seneviratne the poet at his best, displaying in an effortless stroke of his pen, that even absolutisms and the rawest of moments reveal to us, not one, but several faces. For, even in that “other wilderness”, in places that defy language, where our everyday parts of speech prove useless, there is still the possibility that we are, “no less empowered/ no less lost.”
Always, in Edges, Senviratne the journalist is never far away. The ability to capture vignettes of place and moment as he travels by them comes out in Delft, Jaffna and Kataragama. In Delft he sees, “…children being children/ and childhood slipping/ slower still into youth and adulthood.” In Jaffna he records, “Land of life/ made for trespassing/in this uniform or that”, and of Kataragama, “that’s easy dictum/the going-without-saying/of come-without-saying”. All this, however, is tempered by the poet’s sensibility and reading, into what would have otherwise been only a recording of place and moment. It is the poet speaking when he ends Delft by saying, “time passed, you might say/ yes/ so fast that nothing has changed.” Or Jaffna with, “land wrapped in prayer/in tides that go/and take away all footprints/but that of human things/a singular smile/a boat that came home/and wheels that turn.”
Just as the journalist that is in him cannot be kept out of Seneviratne’s poetry, neither can the political commentator of a particular stance, for which he has come to be known. However, the commentary is different when he re-looks at the very issues that he comments on from a place of fluidity, from that place where things are scattered and defy conventional definition. What happens then, to UNHCR petitions that have been pressuring us to confess to crimes “uncommitted”? His stand here is the same as in his political writing, but his poetic honesty gets the better of him in the end. He sees only the inevitable, as these, he says, are “storms beyond our strength/ tender in the passing of time/ in full cognition of light and shade/ and the infinites of configuration/we fall, we rise/ as we always have.” Yet, political themes are sparse in this collection, for needless to say, they have no place nor carry the same meaning in spaces beyond the arbitrary lines.
The focus of the book is more on those things of heart and feeling than of ideology or dogma. It is when Seneviratne writes about them that his real strength as a poet, nuanced in imagery and skilled in word usage, emerges. Absences is one such poem, where in less than 20 lines, he takes the reader into the world of love and dis-possession. He says, of the woman who weeps tears to addresses other than his, that, “when you sit here/ and when I feel I am absent/ and absented/through all this and more/ now and again/ you are beautiful.” In another poem, Percussion, one of my favourites and possibly one of the best in the whole collection, he captures the timeless energy and passion of drummers’ lives and their movements by pinning down that ineffable quality of the drummer and the drumming through a precise honing in on the smallest of actions. “Long before drum roll/ moves foot to dance,” he says in the poem, “there’s…/tender play of finger on skin/ tightening of sinew/ glistening of knuckle/ wresting of rhythm/ from fire and earth.”
Edges is a collection of poems that needs to be read and re-read for all that it says and all that it brilliantly creates through both words and through silence.
| Book facts
Edges by Malinda Seneviratne. Reviewed by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe. Published |