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.