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Keki N. Daruwalla. Night River New Delhi. Rupa. 2000. 112 pages Rs95. ISBN 81-7167-480-1
WHAT A GREAT PLEASURE to read and reread for review and to have for fresh rereadings another substantial book of solid poetic achievement from this topranking India poet in English. Except for occasional subject matter - e.g., "Partition Ghazal," allusions to Gandhi and Godse (in "On a Dying Milennium") or to the Babri Masjid-Ayodhya debacle, or the like, and when an Indian subject requires words like mantra or vish kanyas (a wondrous phrase explained within the poem as "those poisoned-womb concubines / for the neighboring king, / who would die even as he co-habited with them" - almost no elements of style or usage indicate specifically that the work is from India. To the contrary, the whole volume is markedly global, both formally, in multiple details of imagery and technique, and in its scope of interests and perspective: in one poem the poetspeaker's mother visits him in Helsinki; the first poem is of Chinese poets traveling down the night river (which appears often and in different forms in many later poems); there is an "Egyptian Testament," "A Faiz Quatrain," "The Stalin Epigram," a comment on a disaster "Under the Ionian Seas" (with an F-i74 trawler, presumably another telling, globally informed detail), a poem on Darius ("Darreios [After Cavafy]"), a solid section of poems titled "Stalking Mandelstam." And yet it is unmistakably Keki Daruwalla's thoroughly grounded voice and way of feeling further widening and deepening its range here. As an interviewer reported in India Today, no competent observer could now consider calling him a policeman poet, or even, one might add, a Parsi poet, despite the several poems that reference Persia, Mazda, or Zoroastrian fire-temple practices and beliefs.
This collection, the poet's first in five years (though nineteen poems previously appeared in national and international journals), seems to me darker, denser, and more direct than those in such prior volumes as Landscape (1987)...