Nabina Das
A Trek with
the Buddha Bard
A review of Yuyutsu Sharma’s ANNAPURNA POEMS: Poems
New & Collected, 2008
Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s face is like a mountain terrain, when
the earth emerges in the gods’ peaks after a flash flood or when a river has
receded after the monsoon’s regal fury. I noticed this as soon as I sat down
opposite to him in the surprisingly sparsely populated Barista coffee shop in
New Delhi’s fashionable Khan Market shopping area. Poet of the Himalayas,
Yuyutsu’s greeting resounded almost true in what he wrote in “In the Mountains”:
Fragile my eyeglasses
fragile and foreign
I take them off;
There’s a speck of a scar in them.
On the mule path
I take them off
to face the green
stretch of mountains
beneath the saddle of Annapurnas.
Well, almost true, because he didn’t wear eyeglasses at our
meeting! His dark irises reflected the green he writes about and the twining
paths he sees better without his educated eyeglasses. And since we met to chat
– we didn’t waste time to get on first-name terms – the discussion rightfully
turned quickly to his meditative collection Annapurna Poems, a Nirala Series
book published in 2008.
On that sweltering summer evening, leafing through the
Annapurna poems brought in a sudden whiff of cool mountain air. Musical and
reflective. Indeed, Yuyutsu’s poetic tenor is pretty much that of a bard, his
voice that treks higher and higher into the wild beautiful upper Himalaya
bringing alive the smile of the Buddha and the semiotics of the region’s
everlasting gods and goddesses, the Yeti and other resident animals, the
soulful rivers, and the ice-kissed rain. True, Yuyutsu laments the loss of a
familiar landscape he witnessed prior to political trouble fanning out across
Nepal. But his enthusiasm is very much rooted to the peoples’ grasp of their
own surrounding, the Nepal that is home to communities and creeds, whether he
sees them in the backdrop of the Maoist insurgency or that of a defunct
monarchy.
On the level of language, this poetry takes us straight into
the heart of the mountain country, Nepal’s unique ethos and the nature that
entertains both snowy seasons and hidden eternal gardens. The mule paths, the
‘leech-greasy’ forests, the spells under which the mountain people live and
tell fantastic tales, the ‘magnificent daggers of snow’, all build up a world
where nature is more than just a phenomenon. It is a companion to the poet and
his perception. The cognitive faculty of the poet and the reader works in
tandem in recognizing the many layers of meanings unfolded in each aspect of
“Annapurna Poems”, exactly like the different layers of the snow. The
permafrost is made of the century-old legends and tales on which have grown new
fables and events.
Yuyutsu is a poet of expressions as he traverses a train of
simplicity. He does not twist language in any show of wizardry. He believes in
words and sentences, as they are known and heard in the Himalayan reality, to
take him along the mountain journey to rediscover the known nomenclature and
trusted actions. All he does is re-paint the scenes of Annapurna in unique
details and from surprising angles. Like little Tibetan thangkas. In these
scenes, he tells us about those place names that ring out the jeweled
eco-system of a mountain town or village as familiar as our recurrent dreams.
With him we walk the salt tracks, the gorge trails and visit Birethanti.
Ghorepani, Gandrung, Tadapani, Lake Fewa, and many such tongue-trilling spots.
For him,
Hillside roosters
Punctual, announcing the dawn
are known elements. If sometimes they might appear
delightfully alien to our practiced eyes:
Possessing floral
Faces of riverside birds
They still draw us into the world of Annapurna like ice
drops in the cracks (Yuyutsu himself says in the foreword of the book that his
poems exist in each crack of this magnanimous mountain world).
Even in this pristine surrounding something troubles the
poet who watches the spray of the white surf:
on greasy crotches
of huge mossy rocks
started singing
…
coughing out
the cacophony of cruel cities
In Yuyutsu’s poetry one might like to find the Blake-ian
dilemma of having to dividing the human soul between Nature and its sufferance,
mingle her own fate and existences with that of gods, the Yeti and shamans, and
the myriad mysterious of Shangri-La, where imageries take fantastic shapes and
have their own sensual and sensuous existence (River: Morning)
…
each time I come
to her deafening banks
to gleam my dreams
over the plump flanks of her warm body
…
and a wrinkle appears
across the shriveled leaf of my life.
However, he is not merely a romantic poet. What comes across
is his deep admiration for the Annapurna region as a system tied to the rest of
the world – those parts of the world where he is a traveler of a different kind,
giving talks and workshops, reading his published work and attending literary
events. In the context of these ‘worldly’ acts where he attributes his own
poetry having the “otherworldly” and “archival” quality, he is very much a
realist. The book’s first section, “Little Paradise Lodge”, is an account of
Nepal and Annapurna’s past and present. Interestingly, ‘lodge’ appears to be a
pun on ‘lost’ as if he was talking about a ‘little paradise lost’. To me the
poems in this section are very much a ‘lost and found’ affair.
On the other hand, quite prominently, his Eliotesque sarcasm
for the modern city life and the external influences on his much loved
landscape of rains and snows adorn the images he paints in “Rains”:
…
This summer they held me up
In the deserts of their skyscrapers.
…
my face in the dark
feeling tips of snow sacred fishtails of Machapuchchare.
In “Mules” too, their ringing bells are but ‘beating notes
of a slavery modernism brings’. While mapping the ‘bloodthirsty mule paths
around the glacial of Annapurna’, Yuyutsu watches:
cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,
solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards
sacks of rice
and iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai.
…
human and mule lives meet
Rain, river, snow, singing gorges and brooks rule the
landscape of Annapurna Poems. The romance is palpable between the poet and his
subject, almost Sufi in character, ‘madness’ being one of its virtues. Yuyutsu
is in complete enchantment of his terrain as a lover is and this love’s longing
is realized in a woman’s physical quest (A Lonely Brook):
a lonely woman
waits for a stranger to come
and burst
the ice frozen between her thighs
to make a flame
of her cold sleep
…
Conversation with the river (River) is a personal history, a
sequel to the secret rendezvous with the beloved and is artistically lusty.
Between your decisions
and my flickering lamps
the river mad
you, you poet, you bastard, go away!
With Yuyutsu we travel to Ghandrung where a ‘young girl of
the scarlet shawl waits/for the colorful procession/of mules carrying cartons
of Tuberg beer to pass’ or to Ghorepani, all the while delightfully
apprehensive or even curious if a Yeti was following ‘your trail in the
desolate mountains’.
Among these portraits resembling eternity’s passing of time
in the mountain world, we empathize with the pain in the poets voice (Fish):
Wives wait the final winter
of my rot, opening up
the greed
of their slithering fish
I return to a poem
I postponed decades ago
to touch the mating serpents
slithering on the tip of illicit door
called death.
The book’s second section “Glacier” takes this sentiment to
a crescendo as one feels literally like climbing heights with titles like Kala
Patthar, Gauri Shankar, Summit and The Buddhist Flag Flutters and looking below
with a rooster’s eye view at the fields, the forests and the (once) playful
courtyards with their brass bells. The overture continues with the third part
“Sister Everest”, a pithy and less descriptive section. In that, the latter is
highly evocative. If the first sections read like an ethereal ‘inward’ trek
through the upper Himalayan terrain, this section readies us for the fourth one
– “The Annapurna Man” – rooted more in the poet’s ‘outward’ experiences. A very
brief section, it spews more pain than pleasure. To some extent, I came out of
the book through this section with a sense of abrupt termination, as if
Yuyutsu’s pain had to invite a quick clinical surgery. For this, the poetry in this
section seems disjointed from the book’s original spirit.
Especially, I felt “Silence” is too much of rumination, too
personal and reads more like purgation than poetry. The best piece in this
section is “Space Cake, Amsterdam”, a witty poem combining introspection and
observation by ‘this man from Kathmandu’ (one may well imagine, the rest of our
chat that evening centered around that one fantastic experience Yuyutsu
recounted to me). The air-conditioned air at that Barista throbbed at my mirth
on reading and re-reading the line – ‘whatever happens, you can always make a
comeback’!
Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s website is http://www.yuyutsu.de where
one can find recent updates about his work and readings. And he has made a
comeback, for he has just released “Space Cake, Amsterdam” from Howling Dog
Press (I am yet to have a copy) and is currently working on Pratik, a
collection of contemporary Indian poetry, with the renowned Indian-English poet
Jayanta Mahapatra.
Nabina Das
The Quataquatantankua
"The pigeons strutting freely in your courtyard
coo like exhausted porters
climbing the mule paths in the singing gorges.
Their guttural quataquatantankua --
they seem to be using human language,
a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use."
-- ("Little Paradise Lodge" by Yuyutsu RD Sharma; Annapurna Poems, 2008)
Emeralded into the crevices
of words
our roads emerge with
coffee and brine
to fan out far towards a city
a peak, a town --
each an odd-eyed rooster
in one legged-patience.
I see one losing its blue
in the smear of newsprint
another being pocketed
by hands that grope --
grope my soft tissues
benath the skin of gauze
but the ones bunched deep
inside my throat go untouched!
So, I can gurgle: "Quataquatantankua,
Quataquatantankua, Quataquatantankua."
Ramro chha, ramro chha, ramro chha?
And the reply bubbles
up in the foothill methane:
All is good, nothing's amiss
where gods sleep; we keep awake to
sharpen our verbs in the dawn.
Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her poetry and short stories have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies across North America and India. A 2nd prize winner of a recent all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, she is a 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference. An Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years, she now freelances. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs when not writing.
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