a small tree of tender
leaves by K Ramesh, CinammonTeal Publisher, 2020, p.53
A Haiku Spell
Reviewed by Pravat
Kumar Padhy
K
Ramesh is one of the finest voices of contemporary Indian haiku. Being a teacher
in Physics, I think he follows the aesthetic principles of haiku with
sensibility and honesty. He is a great admirer of rural poetic sketch and
through his art of words, he enlivens the moment with simplicity and
gracefulness. He chooses to translate the image with the infusion of poetic
energy. He observes the happenings at present as to how to haiku, and presents the
readers to rejoice in the words of Gary Snyder “help us live where we are now.”
He crafts haiku as a metaphor for aesthetic search with
imaginative rendering and thus readers enjoy the ‘lifefullness’of poetry.
Ramesh explores
aesthetic essences from nature including tiny creatures like ants, butterflies,
cicadas, lizards, crickets, beetles etc. When you read the beautiful lines of
the collections, largely you will feel “Small is beautiful and the beauty lies
in its simplicity.” I recall the opening stanza of the poem, ‘Little Things’ by
Catherine Pulsifer:
Simple things are the
little things
Such happiness they can bring
From watching a sunrise
To giving a child a simple surprise.
Gazing gently at the tender leaves under the evening
breeze, Ramesh crowns his collection with tenderness:
a small tree
of tender leaves…
evening breeze
I
feel in his poetic endeavor, there has been an intuitive playfulness of transgressing
the observations into cadences of human fulfillment. Many a time, we knowingly
or unknowingly overlook the nuances of nature: whispers of breeze or muse of
silence in between the chirpings. But Ramesh as a poet is very sensitive to tuning
every note preserved in nature to sing the song. This is where he ignites the
poetic spell as a worshiper of nature with the Zen feeling. He tries to script
the silence in between and interacts with a meditative language thus exploring
the unseen to unveil with the touch of ‘poetic surprise’.
Interestingly,
honouring the basic elements of haiku, he quite often blends the ‘whitespace’ and
creates intra-juxtaposition in the phrase section of haiku:
winter morning…
I open my hands
to a newborn calf
*
summer dawn…
listening to one cuckoo,
I
hear many more
Rightly
so, HF Noyes says, “When we let go of
all our preconditioning, discarding our habitual mental sets, biases and
stagnant emotive states, our brush against the small and ordinary connects us
with the universal and eternal. The absence of the period at the end of the
modern haiku is meant to leave the haiku open-ended for an echoing extension
into what Blake termed “eternity's sunrise.” Ramesh exhibits a sense of
nostalgia and gratification for nature. He discovers the sound of silence, hidden
stories of the universe in a pebble and metaphorically steps, with a quantum
shift, into the night of the Milky Way:
daybreak in the forest…
the silence between two calls
of
a Malabar thrush
*
on the pebble
so many stories
of
the universe
*
power failure…
I step into the night
of
the Milky Way
His sense of observation is so vivid that it lingers
with the readers for all times to come. Some of his memorable senryu reflect
lightheartedness (karumi) with keen observation (ugachi):
performance over…
the dancer removes her earrings
with
a smile
*
in the cart
the garbage heap taller
than
the street cleaner
Fay Aoyagi blends the spirit of haiku with senses
and says, “With haiku eyes, I see my inner self. With haiku ears, I listen to
my surroundings. With haiku tongue, I taste my past. With haiku nose I sense my
future. With haiku fingers I open and close tiny drawers in my mind.” Nature restores with care the sublime manifestation of ethical goodness.
Ramesh tries to explore this quietude in a meditative way. I find Ramesh tries to embody the sensory language with
brilliance.
daybreak…
I drink tea facing
the
hill’s silence
*
forest guest house…
scent of the teakwood bed
throughout
the night
*
single
call of the night-heron so many stars
The beauty resides in the rural
landscape. Ramesh tries to reflect Indianness with diligent lyrical quality in
his haiku. The modulation and structural configurations of haiku uplift and he
often believes in a ‘communicative and interactive’ model to celebrate the
moment. This is unique in his poems:
sunlit valley…
the little shepherdess talks
to
a calf
He is concerned about the ecological aspects and skillfully
blends the socio-religious aspects. The pulse of juxtaposition is crafted with
the shades of reality:
a heron’s pulsing throat…
the river thin
on
the riverbed
*
long afternoon…
the church spire shade
reaches
the beggar
The
usages of metaphorical phrases like ‘night of the Milky Way’, ‘world of pebbles’
etc enrich the intensity of images. In places, the magic of haiku is manifested
through innovative language and structural framework. The following haiku
elucidates how his self-interaction care to portray the dynamics of image
construction. This is a unique art of assimilation of self with the other thus
entering into a philosophical milieu with a subtle twist. Let us observe the
metrical framework, rhythmic beats and linguistic braiding within the phrase
section of the following haiku and juxtaposition:
if not for the moonlight
I wouldn’t have noticed…
glide
of a heron
Ramesh unveils his
poetic excellence from the surroundings in a brilliant style. A few poems like
‘balcony
breeze…/ a full red moon / between the
apartments’; ‘stormy weather…/
the sway of two trees/ entwined together’ (depiction of sort of cause and
effect) modestly portray the
observations and could have been poetically augmented.
There has been great
pleasure in exploring poetic sparks in Ramesh’s haiku. His haiku are at the
best of exploring the depth of simplicity (iki) and nuances associated
with common images. James Hillman once wrote: “Mind is fundamentally
poetic in nature”. Soul is “that which deepens.” I think poems by Ramesh have hidden souls that will amaze everyone. Nothing could be more
poetically profound to define haiku spell to celebrate with the concluding poem
Ramesh pens with resonance:
hillside view…
I don’t mind waiting
for
the waiter
Publication: The Wise
Owl, Review Supplement, August, 2023.
