HYDERABAD: The wild gypsy dreams of Federico Garcia Lorca clung to solitary forests creeping into the eyes of those who mustered the courage to peep inside the twisted kaleidoscope and they were amply rewarded.
This reward is often sought after that not many poets offer. And those who offer weave threads of their soul to the shadow of the Spanish poet. That’s how they write of olive trees and pianos in rain.
Poet Inam Hussain’s sense and sensibilities matches in this context. He’s alone, but celebrates himself and moves the crowd. His book offers a deep insight to his philosophies and what he borrows from mythologies of the world. The end result, of course, in the form of the book is a rebellion, an uprising with torchlights of words that seduces the minds of readers making them fall in love, helplessly and uncontrollably, with the modern fable that he presents. The seduction of his art stays, asking the reader to visit his works again and again.
Many poems from the book stand as lighthouses while waves carry ashore the darkness experienced by the poet. It’s important to witness the gloom as sometimes it curls its umbrella and lets light fall all around in splinters. What’s noticeable here is that this light cuts your fingers the moment you go ahead to pick it up. But the experience stays. To understand this sample these lines:
The wreck of your thoughts was found in the snow and
you took the poison in the afternoon glow
There are legends of destruction out of which emerge songs soaked offering both poison and nectar. Tiresias doesn’t come, but hope grows on faraway fields with golden wheat crop. While his harvest grows, the poet plays with interesting images like:
A motif of rose petals, your song
He rebels with the demons both inside and outside his mind, cracks his whip and moves on his own. Those who notice smell the wind and ask his address. It’s nowhere else except his Eliotic lines that release you from yourself in a typical way attained by Sufis.
The cacophony of customs rings outside this periphery and a light circles those spots of darkness that need to be washed away from this country, its cities, its people. He’s not offering any solutions. He is preparing a voice inside the laboratory of language which has its own colours and though often abstract, paints an epiphanic picture. These colours are soaked in his ghazals as well where he drifts away from the masters of the craft and creates his own style.
He, however, doesn’t do justice to the several haiku the book begins with. The images fit better in a free verse poem. Many purists will debate on the rhyme scheme of 5-7-5 syllable count. Or maybe the poet was experimenting.
The book also has several of his photographs that are surrealistic in nature and blend with the more complex poems towards the final pages of the book. The poems are heavily punctuated with references from Greek mythology. For a cerebral romance one should read this book.