Name of the Book: A Trellis of Ecstasy
Genre: Poetry
Author: Lily
Swarn
Publisher: Authorspress New
Delhi India
Year
of Publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-93-86722-45-4
Pp.: 235
Price: ₹
395.00 US$ 20.00
Reviewer: WaniNazir, Pulwama, J&K (India)
Dark clouds of
miseries and deprivation cast in the sky of human life come always with some
silver linings. People afflicted with dolour and grief often turn out as the
most creative amongst their race. Or to say more precisely, angst has creative
perks. Aristotle too echoed the same "that all men who have attained
excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art... even Socrates and Plato, had a
melancholic habitus". This belief was versified by Milton in his poem,
Il Penseroso:
Hail, divinest
melancholy
Whose saintly visage
is too bright
To hit the sense
of human sight
The veneration of
gloom was catapulted to its logical acme by Keats by asking, "Do you
not see how necessary a World of Pains and trouble is to school of
intelligence?”
“A Trellis of Ecstasy” by Lily Swarn,
too, is an outpouring of a bruised soul rendered in shards by the strong buffets
of pain and agony - the arrows and slings that racked the very being of the
author deep down. But like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, the angst
paid dividends by bodying forth poetry, the eternal lines, out of the creative
womb of Lily Swarn the same way an oyster exudes a pearl out of sea-sediments
after experiencing the harrowing travails. The plumes of pain in her case
transmuted into 'soft rain' that 'drenched' the 'innards and a
dam broke’:
A sigh sneaked out
from my heart's rubble
And mingled with
the monsoons
Tempest thrashed
against jagged cliffs
And washed ashore
the breakers.
(From Preface of the Book)
Lily Swarn,
despite having scads of blanks, a horde of sorrows, wringing her very petite
soul with paroxysms of grief and loss, strides along like a Titan:
Let
me for once stand tall
Despite
my diminutive stature
Allows
me to stride like a Titan
(FROM THE HEARTS OF SOME WOMEN)
It is the creative
encounter and engagement that comes handy to the author to hitch the wagon of
her life from the quagmire of angst. She elsewhere says, "In the past
five years, reading and writing alone saved me from going mad with grief".
And “Trellis of Ecstasy”, a host of her brain children, proves to
be an escape hatch for her to exterminate the brute of grief. She has employed
poetry to see life in an all-encompassing vantage to embrace joy and sorrow and
barter gratitude in lieu of the joyful moments and innumerable bounties life
brings along with itself. As she writes in one of her poems, ‘Forgive Me’
I read on the Facebook timeline of the author:
Forgive
me
Forgive
me if I say
Life
is such a precious gift
When
the spotted sparrow
Nuzzles
her tender fledgling
In
the precarious toxic fumes.
The book, adorned
with 140 poems, is divided into seven sections: The Prize Winning Poems,
Conversation with my Soul, Nature Poetry, Love, Spontaneous Ponderings,
Portraits, and Alliterations. Variegated themes have been put across through
the poems the book contains.
The poem, 'My Story' being
the semblance of the same titled autobiography by Kamala Das, the cry and anguish
of the poetess is blatantly heard, the same quarry of pain and anguish
experienced by the invisible piercing bullets patriarchy aims at women as
vociferated by Kamala Das, Gayatri Spivak, and the ilk. The echoes of the lines
from Kamala Das’s poem, ‘Introduction’:
With a
rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours
reverberate
so vehemently in the poem:
I write about a lump of clay
That pretends to be something more
……………………………………………………….
This
squeamish terror stricken
Wide
eyed lost soul
Scoffing
at its own limitations
And
fist fighting its dejections
Blundering
into arenas
Never
trodden before in tight jeans
The expression ‘the lump of
clay’ connotes the ephemeral nature of flesh. The chic and pomp of earthly
life is targeted. The poetess metaphorically by the device of Swiftan irony
lashes out at the human pride and haughtiness.
The poet succeeds in evolving and
establishing Gothic mise en scene in the poem ‘Amavasya’. We discern how the poet, as if accompanying, hand
in hand, Horace Walpole or Clara Reeve, has struck a morbid note of murkiness
when she says:
It was
dark
As dark
as Amavasya
No moon
night hurling stones
Men are
considered as supreme and this is what the poetess ironically paints with an
artistic brush.
How easy it is to be misled into believing
That men are god’s gift to mankind
The women
as the poet exposes their wounds in raw are the instrument like the strings of
a guitar:
…like women
Perfectly sculpted puppets dangling on strings
In 'Smothered in the Cul De Sac', the poetess has made allusions to the Romantic tragedies of Shakespeare and Robert Greene:
The confetti of loves
Lost in Time’s cruel twisted
Lanes in Delhi’s ancient walled city
The poem makes abundant use of the
device of imagery. The odyssey of love has been curtailed revealing the
pessimistic and hapless approach of the poet:
The road
stopped here
There was
no beyond
The
showers of blossoms
Went to
their graves
In the poem 'Frost’ the
poet has deplored the obstacles that an artist is beset with while making art
very artful. The poet weeps over the impediments faced by an artist in bringing
about certain reformation. The poet complains:
Icy
fingers of indifference
The
silence between two humans
A frosty
shuddering gloom
The image of frost has been used
the way Coleridge has used it in ‘Frost at Midnight’, a symbol of a
frozen world where the subject matter of poetry remains static, the way it has
been used as a symbol of obstacle in Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of
Darkness”. The unfathomed silence and chill has plummeted down all the
sinews of the poet that has left her in eerie petrification:
Buds shriveled before blooming
Under the frost of wintry burning
Droplets of rain on your window pane
But the
poet does not shun the hope for a miracle in the midst of this frozen voyage of
life as she is:
Waiting for the whip of spring
To thaw my frost bitten heart
The note
of this optimism is as powerful as Shelley strikes in his ‘Ode to the West
Wind’
If winter
comes, can spring be far behind?
In 'She',
the women is treated with tenderness and devoid of any irony. The poem has
enormous overtones of Mary Leaper’s ‘An Essay on Woman’:
Woman a pleasing but a short-lived flower
Too soft for business and too weak for power
A wife in bondage or neglected maid
In the poem, the essential goodness of a woman’s heart is brought to the surface. She has been called a clown by the poet only to expose that her credulity is suffering an undue advantage:
While trying out her Mama's high heels and lipstick
like a clown
She is her own woman soon
Who will not bow to patronizing male superiority
The poem has the theme of gender role and how a woman is treated as the denizen of the third world, a subaltern, as stated by Gayatri Spivak in her influential essay, 'Can a Subaltern Speak?’
In 'I Died’, we see the poet targeting the pomp of human pride as something like a fist of sand, something ephemeral, the sunlight as if falling on morning mist, how the sliver coloring of the ferny floor hastes away soon, and how our life on the planet is terribly evanescent:
I froze like
A moth on ice
Did you see the filtered
Shades of sunlight
Bathing my aura?
Coming to the
experimentation of forms and styles, the book has ‘a god’s plenty’.
There are Free Verses, Tankas, Alliterative poems, Palindromes, Mesostic poems,
Limericks, Roseate Sonnets, Tidlings that embellish the book to the nth degree,
and is an attestation of the author’s prowess of making the forms her pen’s
slave. Her foray into the realm of pain and annexation with the territory of
despair makes her style and language take on a new timbre that rivets the
reader’s attention and emotions to the verses so much so that the reader falls
victim to ‘the alienation effect’ to use Bertolt Brecht’s phrase.
Let’s
hope more literary creations from Lily Swarn in future.
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