Empathising while capturing People’s loneliness and fear
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Appealing in its rich colours and tantalising title, Buddhadasa Galappatty’s new collection of poems (published in December 2021) will certainly in the future be returned to and leafed through again in private libraries, because like Nashe’s “In Time of Plague”, it is bound to haunt readers who underwent a worldwide view of the 17th Century poet’s limited British experience.
“Brightness falls from the air; The Plague full swift goes by
I am sick, I must die”
However, though some of the most striking poems focus on COVID, there is a fascinating variety of subjects and backgrounds to absorb the reader’s imagination and reflections, including robust encounters on the streets or campus and delicate interludes, such as the obsessive lure of an indifferent woman
“She is lovely –
Slender, not tall
Neither fair nor dark
- a hue only she possesses
Clothed fastidiously for walking
Though we are face to face
She does not glance at me”
or the poignant ‘After a Dream’.
Gallappatty’s animated visual delineation has an intimacy, a sense of interaction and empathy that can reach out even over the dreary perhaps endless pandemic, where fear houses itself in us.
Galappatty recognises and responds to the pain people endure. He portrays the confusion and panic faced by a lone victim of the pandemic, compelled to leave his pets to starve or die; his civil financial status is not known; children abroad may arrive – to be quarantined, but he has to be hospitalised. In a companion piece “I cry” is the voice of a lone lodger frightened by the frequent sound of ambulances conveying (he assumes) corpses; his window offers sight of a cemetery with a continually smoking crematorium, void of mourners and he decides that his duty is to mourn the deserted dead.
When the Health Services were impelled to advocate the postponing of pregnancy due to the dangers of COVID, a poem delicately merges pure beauty with sadness in “A Modern Mahamaya’s dream”.
But urgency is sometimes inescapable – as in “Love in the time of Corona”. Needs vary: ‘Love in Corona Time Lock Down Nonagathe’ is brief and sardonic
Leaving aside all work
Garbed in white
With oil, flowers and incense
One should enter a temple or kovil
The places of worship are locked:
The bells are dumb
No fragrance of flowers
The grounds are empty.
The pious do not seek
The grounds where they worship:
Waiting devotedly
Behind white masks
For vans that sell
Vegetables or fish.
It is not only what the writer perceives but what he experiences that enforces the dismal loneliness of the period. The intense depression caused by missing familiar voices is cancelled, if only briefly:
On this coast, relatives and close friends
Ask me about my moods, my health
Across the sea, my children’s tones
Convey their constant fears and care,
And I am gladdened by their talk
Sadly, the verse is preceded by memories of special faces and places he was deprived of visiting
From dawn to dusk the news is sad
Hearing of kin or close friends lost
Galappatty’s poetic idiom has an energy and flexibility that animates the reader’s reactions and feelings. We have known even worse periods in the past, when his poems for all their clarity and force could not clear or brighten the atmosphere or our reflections: let us appreciate the new quirks of his inspiration while we hope for sober and saner times ahead.
(The reviewer is a former Head, Department of English, University of Kelaniya)
| Book facts | |
| “E Asirimath Nonagathaya” by Buddhadasa Galappatty Reviewed by Dr Lakshmi de Silva |
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