Indian poet CP Surendran on Lost Horoscope by Yuyutsu Sharma

 

The Lost Horoscope is a longish, Gerontian type of poem; an old man trying to come to grips with his life. The narrator in Yuyutsu Sharma's poem is looking for his horoscope - ‘A scroll of homemade scented paper’. In the process, he realizes that all the predictions that the ‘lanky priest’ made, may have been already lived in a series of ‘monstrous Nostradamus moments.’  

How are these moments suffered or even survived? By means of a phrase. In poem after poem, Yuyutsu Sharma negotiates his experiences in terms of language, the only tool that the poet has: the word is the way out of the world bearing in on him like a tidal wave. 

In Dai, Chengdu, for instance, the overtures, even invasions, of a lady (‘Her eyes shone like blackbirds/in the white nest of her singing face’) are made sensible as attempts to find the name of a relationship that can explain the attraction she feels for the poet.  The poem is a search for a word that resolves the violence of the interactions: Dai, meaning brother. 

Yuyutsu’s poetic persona perceives himself, naturally, as an endangered species. Its sanity and even survival are wholly dependent on words, a means to re-live and make sense of the little catastrophes that the hour hands of the clock tick through. Words and phrases, that eternalize the near-apocalyptic Nostradamus moments. 

Words and phrases that help the narrator to wrap the universe around his eyes; with the verbal shades on, he can gaze deep into the heart of the moment that nearly destroyed him. An accurate word is born when the poet dies a little every time he brings his experience-at first an event, then meaning-to speech. It is in this sense that in these new poems, Yuyutsu Sharma finds his lost horoscope.

 

--CP SURENDRAN

 

C.P. Surendran is a poet, novelist, journalist and screenplay writer. His poetry collections include Gemini II, Posthumous Poems, Canaries on the Moon and Portraits of the Space We Occupy. He is the author of three novels, An Iron Harvest, Lost, Found and most recently, One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B. He divides his time between Bombay and Delhi.

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma

 ISBN 978-8195781638 pp. 72 Hardcover Rs. 495 

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