At some point, you begin to feel the contours of a landscape taking shape on the pages of G Biju’s poetry collection. ‘Lopasandhi’, arguably the first graphic poetry book in Malayalam, topples familiar notions about an anthology of verse and urges you to cobble up a nouveau aesthetics.
The grey and black pages dotted with tufts of white letters bring to life the rocky countrysides of Pathanamthitta. “The book is my journey back in time, to my village Kokkathode taking in the sights and sounds familiar to me in my childhood,” says Biju, who dabbles in video designing and art direction.
Trained in fine arts from a local school in his hometown, Biju started his career as a designer at DC Books. He went on to take a degree in animation from Delhi and worked for animation studios for a while. Meanwhile, he also penned radio plays for All India Radio and wrote poems in vernacular publications.
“As a designer, I was intrigued by the possibility of a visual representation of poetry. The studios allowed little time for such leisure and I had to give up the career in animation to work on my concept,” says Biju, who now works for a graphics design firm in Bangalore.
He attempted to give form to his concept of graphic poetry in his first book ‘De’ (Look) by creating patterns through the alignment of words and lines. “There were no pictures and the visual element was brought in purely through the arrangement of the text. In my second book, ‘Photoshoppil Oru Atmakadha’, the poems were supplemented with my pictures and drawings. But the concept was still in its rudimentary stages. It is most boldly stated in my third book, ‘Lopasandhi,’’’ says Biju.
Changing the colour of the page to black and the print to white was a deliberate attempt to jolt the readers out of their comfort zones. “Readers are used to seeing the conventional pattern of black letters on white pages. Switching the colours was more about shaking off the weariness of leafing through yet another poetry book,” he explains.
The book has also subverted other print norms. The poem ‘Thoni’, for instance, tapers down from a two-word sentence to a single syllable with the title hanging at the end of the verse. A poem on rain appears as slanting lines across the pitch black page. The title poem begins at the bottom of a page on which the hillock of ‘Kattathippara’ is sketched in charcoal, evoking a metaphoric valley of memories.
The book, published by Lens Books, has been designed and illustrated by Biju himself. “Finalising the images for each poem was the most difficult part. All of them are hand-sketched, so I could not avail of the help of Control+Z to suit my whims as in computer graphics,” says Biju.
The anthology is appended with notes by critics Ajay Sekhar and M S Paul.
Biju lives with his wife Dhanya Bhaskar, a college lecturer, in Bangalore.