You cannot pretend ignorance of a Plath ("Slavias, that your father named you after," "Red") to Hughes' "Birthday Letters" nor can you refuse to notice the palpable presence of her absence in poem after poems in it. That's inevitable, because Ted-Sylvia misalliance has cached itself in active public memory. But, while viewing the book as a work of art, our concern is with poetry. Is it a collection of poems, each poem having its autonomy? I suggest that "Birthday Letters" be taken as a single poem, each of its sections being given a sub-title. The part-poems (subtitles) are not sequential links, leading one to the other, because all the poems circle around "the centre of the web" (p.5) at which Hughes tries to place the female protagonist and the narrator. And indeed all of the poems in "Birthday Letters" in some way or another are attempts at articulating the complex relationship between these two "characters". 

To create the haze of a story based on two chief personae, the narrative has to contain "biographical details" which Hughes abundantly pushes into this body of work. And many of these micro-shots reveal wonderful flashes of insight. Poems like "Life After Death" stand out with their self-containing poetic world, a world of tragedies, however small, with the wolves offering much-needed external comfort. Mother no more, the two babes and their father come alive in their moment of agony, recreating the fable of the wolf: 

As my body sank in the folk-tale 
where the wolves are singing in the forest 
for two babes who have turned, in their sleep, 
into orphans 
beside the corpse of their mother. 

The fierce poet of "Hawk in the Rain" and "Crow" has mellowed a great deal in "Birthday Letters". The sadness line after lines is diamond: "Your son's eyes have become wet jewels/ the hardest substance of the purest pain" (p.182). 

If you value poetry as an aesthetic work of art, you must substitute "fictionality" for "historicity". The narration is complex: a story of intense passion and more intense hatred, vaguely masked. The story does not matter, the poetry in it oozes, not as Heany has said "avalanching towards vision," but certainly enough to turn your soul moist. 

--Rob Smith 

CHANDRABHAGA : Edited by Jayanta Mahapatra 

Chandrabhaga 1/2000 is back again, after fifteen years by which time it had been established with its fourteen issues as a literary half-yearly journal of high standard from India. 

The second issue, Chandrabhaga, 2/2000, is in the stand. What differentiates it from its earlier issues is its focus on poetry in translation, apart from original poetry in English. 

In the latest issue are featured the established poets like Shiv K. Kumar, Keki N Daruwalla, Rajendra Kishore Panda, Nilmani Phookan and the young ones like Robin S. Ngangom and Arupananda Panigrahi. 

Chandrabhaga is also credited with carrying perceptive criticism on Indian poetry which has always stirred the literary world in India. And to break the monotomy of poetry, there is in each issue a short story. The one in Chandrabhaga 2/2000 "The Monitor" rather reads like a prose poem. 

Would you like to subscribe to Chandrabhaga? You may send $25 as an annual subscription to its poet-editor Jayanta Mahapatra, Tinkonia Bagicha, Cuttack-753001, India. Chandrabhaga is worth preservation. 
 

--P.V. Shivakrishna

A Varnamala Visualization