Review of Vikram Seth's "Summer Requiem".

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(By Dr.Karanarm Rao )

Vikram Seth's newest book of poems, coming out

after the interregnum of nearly twenty years of "The Golden Gate", opens up
a sumptuous wealth of long narratives, and a bunch of short but lyrically
exuberant poems that map out the broad arc of development of out of the
locutions of the poets sensibility, and the agglutinative potential of his poetic
art thats almost serene and contemplative. The poems in this collection are
as powerfully evocative, superbly rendered, and esthetically satisfying , both
in the architectures of imagination and rendition, in Vikram Seths poetic
oeuvre. As the publisher's blurb quotes:
"The book traces the immutable shifting of the seasons, the relentless
rhythms of a great world
that both gifts and harms" .Herein lies the central axis of Seth's poetry that
endeavors to bring both the polarities of poetic "gifting" and "harming", and
of the shifting of seasons, and geographies, and of themes of love and
despair, of man and nature and of mutability and permanence which coalesce
to uphold the facts of poetic essences in which the poet always finds himself
held in perpetual wondered transmutation. And Its where the geographies
blend with continuity and discontinuity, time and space and interact with
shifting moods, and thematic gravitas with ,what EM Forster calls to
connect". The summa of shifting themes and variegated moods are
reflected both in content and form, and seasons apace , are all expressed in
an idiom that lasts for ever, as long as long as the poet's murmurations last.
Seth has used his tremendous resources of intelligence and imagination ,in
developing his themes so delicately shaped and modulated, and offers clues
into the richness of details , into his curve of imagination. The humongous
vitality in articulating all these, and a quick alacrity that traverses all the
geographies to enfold all shades of colors, and the lyrical luster render Seth's
poems significantly and assertively" moments monuments .
The first longish poem Summer Requiem
sets the tone and texture of the poets collection of poems, which are truly
the gems of recapitulated experiences recalled with all the vitality that
shape his poems. Here is a bold attempt at evoking the mood and tonality of
the entire collection of poems.

2..

The poet says : There is nothing left but this/ I shall watch the snakes twist
across the plain, and then gathers momentum as he recaptures how
summer has forced him into the mood of despondency to forsake
detachment jaggedness and discontinuity.
the shell has broken sharply,
the harmony wrapped in hands,
jaggedness and discontinuity
smothered by centuries were crushed in
And what the poet needed to do is to gather and scatter/ gather and
scatter/ of so carefully collected contours of his mind that he feels hes
forever walking in a lost country>.This is loss, the loss of the sense of
rootlessness that haunts the poet through out .He tries to overcome this drift
into discontinuity by reclaiming it in the geography of the mind. The sense of
devastation, and the jaggedness are secured in the repose that he finds in
love and in nature. and the end of summer, the hour of rust brings
everything to a close. is only the beginning of the poets re-launching into
other angularities of perception. This mood of rust is spilled over some of
his longer poems where the poet ruminates on the possible alterations that
would usher him into other vistas when his memory and imagination work
upon him to feel deprivation and a sense of loss into thinking of the
perpetual replacements He writes:
Memory is a poison; it has sickened my body,
the cleavage of attachment has frayed my mind
perpetual replacement is only song of the world.
Serene and reflective, and cast in the free verse ambience, the poem brings
out the poets epiphany with seasons ruminations that border on the
epiphany of the achieved equipoise after the incessant churning of the
imagination. It is this poem that most appeals to the READER.

Significantly, its his small poem that provides the clue to

trace the cure of the poets operative sensibility. In his brief but pithy lyric
I Cant, the poet articulates: I simply cannot get off the bed? I shiver and
procrastinate and stare, The poet simply cannot get out off the brilliant
ambiences of the lyrical exuberance where he finds equipoise.
When asked by someone, why he chooses to write in regular rhyme and
metre, the poet says that he liked them since they provide pith and
memorability I quote here one significant poem , The Darkness to
substantiate my point.
3..
My hands dissolve in water.
My body wastes away.
The air drifts past and through me.
Each night and every day.
Bald and disingenuous bordering on abysmal banality .Seth goes into lyrical
raptures rather inadvertently though, that rhythm and meter would bring
restrictions on the reflective and serene moods of contemplation .They also
imperil the continuous movement of the mood, the complexity of thought and
the involution of mood and meaning .In an interview. Vikram Seth has
observed: I suppose dawn and dusk are the sort of crepuscular state, where
its neither this nor that, where youre losing either night or day These states
lead to a meditative questioning.
The scaffold of a bunch of other poems in the collection,
rests on lyricism which is sometimes fascinatingly done up, and at another
banal and ingenuous. Themes of his smaller poems could be assorted into
three groups: love and frustration, the sense of loss and belonging. But not all
the poems in this capsule of poems are as fascinating as his longer poems
written in free verse form. His love poems seem to capture the mood in the
verbal net in the articulation that rare,
At three the late light glides across,
the lost gold leaves on the ground.
The snow is near, as my loss:
The peaceful love, Ive never found.
In his poem, The Shapes of Things, the poet laments over the swiftly
moving phenomenon of the nature of this, and this mutability affects and

alters the mood, and forces the poet to search for another landscape of
imagination, a new idiom of expression and a new emotive feeling As he
writes:
The shapes of things that are not here,
appear, disappear and re-appear:
A room, a face ,a photograph.
Each day recalls itself to me,
altered into reality.
4..
Among his experimental poems, Haiku stands better. I quote here some
examples:
through the winter night
sleep wont come and thought go round:
yowling cats on heat
then Ill get to work
seven novels, seven plays
seven childrens tales
Vikram Seths love poems are the excellent examples to show his artistic
rendition of the emotive feelings that carries the experiential surplusage to
the finesse of perfection. But where Vikram Seth fails is his unwillingness to
probe the profundities of his poems to awesome heights of the felt
experience, and his reluctance to use the image or metaphor as an artistic de
rigueur makes the poems tepid and disingenuous. Perhaps, the poet felt that
the plainness of utterance and flatness of expression would better do their
job. The love poems border on puerile exercises in futility, and at times the
poems even appear as tripe. Here are two of his poems where the
emotional gravitas falls flat and the all attempts to give them a romantic
coloration brings the poems into balderdash, though a phrase here, and a
notation there, may acquire some signification. We two have lost each other/
why could these wait still till our love could die (Caged). And in another
poem, titled I love this room, room means you to me/ these books, this bed,
this fan, that rug these plays/ predate and outlast this ecstasy. ( Caged ).
These two quotes are evidential of the poets steady reluctance taking his
emotive feelings to brilliant flight into the intimacies of love that formed

and informed the feeling fossils in Romantic poetry. Here Plato seems to have
replaced the melancholic sheen and luster of a Ramnujan or a Nissim Ezekiel
and Pushkin gained precedence.
The title Summer Requiem has come for a systematic
debunking by The Telegraph .It says: Summer Requiem is like a
Renaissance study in melancholy, with lost love and painful memories, This
observation is questionable since the whole thematic gravitas falls on the
central themes of loss and apocalypse of achieved joy and contentment.
Starting with fall where all the trees shed their leaves, the poet redeems his
loss and rootlessness in love and fulfillment and its natural the title aptly
carries the relevance through the conduits of emotional experiences. The
Telegraph also concludes to say that Summer Requiem is not so much the
work of a writer at full tilt as one relying on tried and trusted tactics. I
concur with this observation since the present book is not as fascinatingly
enthralling and esthetically upholding
work of art____________________