Human body, particularly the body of the feminine beauty, is
poetry of God that speaks out from the creative continuum shot out from the
divine beauty. His beauty is a reflection of the outer beauty of Nature that
fascinates us with all the physical charms and draws our heart and mind to
delve deep inside to explore the true entity and perception of inner beauty and
realize the worth of life. The feminine principle of creation and the creative
continuum remains well sustained and maintained by the poetic mind of the
world. Sensuality of pleasure and sensuousness of the senses seem to make us
thrilled and provide the sap to the monotonies of life. Love and erotic poetry
is just the stimulation of our romantic, fantastic endeavour to explore more
and more along the trajectory of feminine body that ultimately leads us to the
illuminating realm of the divine source. In this context, Ra Sh - N. Ravi
Shanker’s poetry is an interesting and engraving roller-coaster to understand
the experience of roaming around in the world of feminine riches. As a
competent and expressive architect, he carves out from the flesh the quintessence of poetic,
spiritual, metaphysical, cerebral exuberance and excellence with unusual and
bizarre imagery and stirring metaphors and this is how all the sexual
connotations and denotations get transformed into an illuminating realm of
divinity dormant in each of being.
Architecture of Flesh by Ra Sh (N. Ravi Shanker) is a poetic guideline that one must go
through for undertaking the journey from the beauty of flesh to the beauty of
soul. It is a perfect package of 51 poems -love and erotic, metaphysical and
philosophical and offers an insight in the sumptuous pleasure realm of flesh to
refresh us to perceive the flash of cosmic beauty. The poet in his poetry gives
a detailed account of woman issues-from atrocities to rape from fear to horror
to their life. Some poems veer around the flesh only to get into the skin of
spirituality and metaphysics.
The titular poem “Architecture of Flesh” is a pathetic
description of plight of women. Recurring rape of woman every now and then
everywhere is a serious affair. With reference to the incidents at Ngariyan,
Gajapati and Khairlanji, the poet condemns such perforating aches by
man as the theme incident of rape and mankind is the painful and short. He
vehemently makes an assault on man:
You run the country from the city.
You have nothing to fear.
You have brains. You have malls.
You have the Metro and Parliament.
With this sarcastic note, he further takes all, through this
sensitive poem, to the glaring pain in the eyes of the victims to arouse some pity
or fear in them:
It is the gloat in the eyes
that bore into the flesh
that day, this day, every damn day.
Exhibit on a table, a spread sheet,
an autopsy chart, a mortician’s design,
an architecture of flesh built around a void,
a hollow, a frozen core.
“The man who loved her” is
a sensitive, thought provoking and profound poem talks about death. He very
poignantly deals with this theme in terms of modern technology. He writes:
Death is a peasant
sowing seeds.
We can bury anyone anything
anywhere like seeds
bodies clothes through images
audio clips memory bytes
He further reiterates:
I will sleep with you;
You will sleep with me;
He will sleep with us.
All my loves
All yours
Will sleep with us.
Even the dead ones.
Even those in the seeds.
Ra Sh is a very sensitive heart.
Atrocities on women, in particular, move him to vent out the wrath against the
demonic people indulged in such heinous and repugnant misdeeds. Political
involvement also faces his diatribe. Elements of casteism are also
perceptible in the lines.
“Black” is a symbolical
poem presenting juxtaposition between dark and light showing preponderance of
love.
Black is the womb of love
Where a one eyed baby
Swims in future’s fluid
Turning densely densely dark.
“Aphrodisiac” is a very
sensitive write drawing the attention towards demonic process of preparing
aphrodisiacs from the bones of babies. It also implies political and moral
degradation. He describes such a world-
‘dark alley eateries
where powdered sperm with battered baby flesh
are sold as phalli pills
to bolster flagging will.
“Whistles”, a poem
dedicated to Japanese film-maker Ozu, contains his lovely viewpoint on love and
death. With the anatomical organs used to communicate his ideas, he expresses
the subtlety of his thoughts in concrete images:
Love whistles through the heart,
Death whistles through the lungs,
Farewells whistle through the wind.
Kisses whistle though the mind.
Ra Sh ‘s philosophy of
karma and sense of acceptance in life is an important concern of the poet who
comes up with words of solace and comforts for the people in dire distress. He
exhorts such dejected hearts to smoke away all the worries of life as the
problems of life are temporary. In “Cosmic Frogs”, he echoes the words
of Krishna pronounced in the Gita:
Whatever happens, let happen, in darkness ,let justice
drown.
thannale veli varum thaynkathe. oru thalaivan irukkiraan
mayankathe.
it will turn out alright, stop worrying. God is watching,
unblinking.
In his poetry there is an
undercurrent of man-woman relationship, ego clashes between the two opposite
sexes, marital exploitations and conflicts. His feminine sympathy is what
sharpens his keen observation of day-to-day problems faced with them. Woman is
a powerful persona with dual roles. She has the power to make or mar. He states
in “Homing”:
She leads us to a street, to a door, to a room, to a bed.
We realize it is our home.
As a conscious poet of
semantic excellence, Ra Sh seems to believe in the primordial sound of words- Shabd
Brahma. He talks about different kinds of words with their own properties,
therapeutic power of words being very significant. The following extracts from
his poem “Words and their cure” can be seen:
I did my own research on Words to conclude
That all words are memories that grow senile.
They pretended to be what they were and are not.
Take religious words, they are a lot
Regimented, with their noses in the air.
Revolutionary words, the fiery ones
Thriving in throngs and intonations.
Some words show a sparkle and grin a lot
Claiming they are deeply spiritual, so neat their mommas
still
Comb their hair.
Some are neglected Words, who live in dark antics and
damp cellars
Poor things, blinded when brought to harsh daylight.
Some Words shackled and hung from a dungeon wall to die.
Romantic Words, yes, lightweight and
Skipping along the floor and who, if not careful,
May bounce off to space.
He concludes the poem with
the note of categorization of words in two five groups- moon words (soft), sun
words (harsh and abusive), Sky words (light and vapour thin), Earth words
(grave and growling), and Water words (wet). But he shows his preference to the
word Love.
The poet tends not to
follow the beaten track. He rather paves his own way to create the tapestry of
his own novel perception or thoughts. “My plump girl” is a very unique poem
celebrating the plumpness of a girl. He presents a brilliant example of
sensuousness in the following lines celebrating the plumpness of flesh:
In reply, I smooched her with several synonyms of Fat
And whispered Fat is mouthful, tasteful, and eyeful.
A handful of flesh is better than two bones in the bush.
Other remarkable lines
showing the sensuousness can be seen in the poem “YOU are a f**king rain!” His
titillating treatment is noticeable here:
You tear down the roof and pick me like a bone
In the jaws of an earth moving Jurassic machine.
Hurl me into the strato meso thermo spheres
And beyond.
The poet is gifted with such
a wonderful pen that describes his observation and perception in a fantastic
way. The portrayal of death in the poem “Seizure” is so realistic and touching.
The image he draws from the world of nature to give a vivid account of the
physical seizure makes us reflective. He bespeaks:
All metabolism frozen,
All life ceased,
In one radiant cloud
mushrooming the sky.
one melting bubble
popping from womb to womb
in silent love.
Repetition of certain words
as a technique to heighten the intensity is a befitting tool of the poet who
exhibits the exuberant feelings in his poetry to make his readers feel so. The
sensuous imagery of ‘a swollen teat’ used to show the intensity of passion of
his ‘vampire girl’ is excellent. “Return
of the vampire”, a sensuous poem on the love-making, has other vivid sensuous
imagery such as ‘blood coated crescents’, tongue lapping his neck ‘like a cat
slurping milk’ etc. As a culmination of excitement, the poem exemplifies it.
I swoon as my vitals dip dip dip
My organs approach the end end end.
A danger sign blinks red red red.
I go blind with love love love.
I go beep beep beep.
You suck me me dry.
Drop me to the grass.
And fly away.
Another intriguing sensuous imagery is noticeable in “Hopscotch
with calculi in the kidney” at two important places when the poet reveals:
I play hopscotch with her.
With three rubies.
Two for her nipples.
One for her sweet spot.
*******
When I pry open her oyster
And seek out her nub
It shines forth like a ruby red kidney stone.
Unlike other poems,
his “War Trophies” is a severe caustic and sarcastic comment on the war-monger
people or nations who spare not even the hospitals. It is a very sensitive
write. The poet is saddened to see hospitals brutally bombed and turning into
‘mass graves’. He writes-
Death is a wheelbarrow
You hitch a ride on
Going block to block
Rubble to rubble
Till you are tipped over
Into an abyss
Where your heart hibernates.
The poet is an iconoclast.
He takes even a neglected thing and renders it as an object of perfection, of
high standard. It is so in case of his unconventional poem “Sins”. Sin is
always something to be ignored but here the poet very boldly accepts that the
more we run away from sins, the more they run after us. He avers-
Even if we don’t go to a sin,
A sin always finds us
And putting its arm around us
Discusses our first and last night
emissions.
May layers of sins
are undercurrent in the poem. He describes-
Sins are fund things,
The eternal fount of youth,
The geysers of the world,
The minerals and vitamins.
Sins play hopscotch,
Offer their bodies to you,
Open, fearless, fulsome.
Because a sin is a tiger ride
Rodeo
A sybian mount.
“Two Vaastu Poems”
has two parts, thus presenting two situations of life. In the first part the
poet refers to brutal sexual assaults of two girls and their subsequent murder.
He calls this nefarious act ‘a genocidal rape’. In the latter part he talks
about the juxtaposition between good and evils. He concludes the poem with a
philosophical note- everything, good or bad, comes ‘under the wheels/ of an
Express Highway’. The best thing about the poem is the progression of the
poet’s thoughts –from flesh and sex to the spirit and spirituality. The poet
feels relieved with his spiritual orgasm.“The case of girl with the slippery
tattoo” is the concluding poem of the book. There is an allusion of yogic
conceptualisation of the feminine power coiled inside as ‘Kundalini’. He plays
with this idea arousing the spiritual awareness to enjoy the pleasure. With a
metaphor of ‘kundalini’ symbolising the latent power of man, he writes:
Where the kundalini resides.
I rubbed it and rolled it up
To the base of her brain stem, but
It slid back like a slippery fish
To rest between her
Ass cheeks.
In
this way we see that (Ra Sh) N. Ravi Shanker’s poetry covers a wide range of themes: woman, sex, dominant gripping
problems of contemporary life, devaluation of human values etc. Love
and sex, spirituality and metaphysics, keen insights into the inner working of
psyche, national and international issues, contemporary socio-political
concerns, plight of woman and atrocities, occupy predominant place in Ra Sh’s
poetry. His are highly eloquent and suggestive expressions. His images are
picturesque, sensuous and aptly brilliant. In the Introduction, Meena
Kandasamy, a celebrated poet and political activist, has rightly called the
book ‘a testimony to our tortured, fragmented times- a world where we
inhabit myths even as we embrace post-modernity, a world where unbridled
capitalism stands ready to destroy everything on its path, a world, where cheap
patriotism threatens to make us lawless land of gundanur gundas, a world where
poetry becomes the last refuge.’
In
short, Architecture of Flesh is a candid honest articulation of his varied experiences and impressions of life in general and an insightful romance of self with flesh and spirit in particular.
It is simply aesthetics of sensuality and spirituality in the politically,
nationally and internationally torn and fragmented self of cosmopolitan sense
of the world.
