Like A Bear Coming Out of a Cloud
Amlanjyoti Goswami, Vital Signs
Poetrywala, 132pp, £12.00, ISBN 9780997025491
reviewed by Frith Taylor
Sincerity gets a bad rap, and perhaps understandably so. It can easily tip into sentimentality, which at best can feel like a kind of deranged optimism; at worst it can carry with it the ickiness of unearned intimacy and emotional exposure. I’m thinking too of the coercive sentimentality in wellbeing practices: consider the range of mindfulness apps cynically employed to pacify the anxious capitalist subject. I will confess to bringing some of these reservations to my initial reading of Amlanjyoti Goswami’s Vital Signs. The first section is entitled ‘Life’, and bears the epigraph ‘Every breath is a birthday’, which at first glance does seem to bear the hallmarks of sentimental poetry, a kind of grandiosity and universalism mingled with the imperative to cherish each moment as a gift.
I was glad to be proven wrong, however, and was struck by the frequent moments of originality and beauty of this collection. If not entirely free of the trappings of sentimentality, Goswami’s collection certainly made me rethink my assumptions about writing that wears its heart on its sleeve. There is something deeply poignant and touching in his appeal for taking stock of life’s sensory pleasures. Sincerity is also unfairly regarded as being naturally antithetical to intellectual rigour or artistic experimentation, something Rishi Dastidar points to in his blurb for Vital Signs, in which he notes Goswami’s attention to ‘that most unfashionable of qualities — a sense of grace’. Goswami’s intermingling of prayerful evocations of the everyday with carefully wrought, intellectually curious considerations of empire, otherness, and the complex histories of language push back against any reservations of mine that foregrounding the emotional means stifling the political.
Vital Signs is a deeply spiritual work in which the quotidian becomes holy. Descriptions of cooking, tasting and selecting ingredients are central to the collection, and elicit the same meditative calm and sensory pleasure as good food writing. In ‘How to peel the perfect potato’, we are invited into the speaker’s kitchen:
Cooking combines richness with ritual. Goswami’s poems of intimacy and invitation force you to slow down, and once you do there is a slow accumulation of meaning through tender observation.
There are startling and original lines too; Goswami creates a compelling mystery and strangeness that borders on disassociation. At first glance the collection is replete with aphorisms and life lessons, valuable for its evocation of family, community, and simple pleasures. But there is something stranger straining at the heart of these poems. In ‘Heart’, he writes:
Goswami makes use of aphorism and the balanced cadence of riddle — ‘if you have it, you have everything’, making the poem at once declarative and enigmatic. By signifying ‘heart’ with an underscore Goswami turns absence into presence; lines that feel aphoristic (and therefore willing to yield their meaning easily) are also surreal and withholding. Hollowing out aphorism destabilises the meaning: we reach for the expected word (here ‘heart’ after ‘you are not faint of _’) but it is withheld. I love the line, ‘Like a bear coming out of cloud’: the fairytale strangeness is striking in its simplicity, and such an interesting evocation of a heartbeat, of unexpected revelation, or of stealthy desires that catch us unawares.
There are many ‘object’ poems in the collection in which the premise is apparently simple, an address to a plant or animal, but from which Goswami draws out associative meanings so that you’re really reading about Delhi, about India more broadly, about relationships, about ‘Life’, as he promised at the beginning of the collection. In ‘Saptaparni’, the speaker describes the fragrance and beauty of the plant sometimes called ‘devil’s weed’.
Again, we have evocation through negation; Goswami tells us about the folklore surrounding saptaparni plants but swiftly follows with ‘But I don’t believe that’, a repeated assertion that becomes a resistance to the delineation of time and order, here surreally figured as ‘the clock with its many arms’. Delhi is at once ‘my city’ and ‘never my city’, alive principally to the speaker through the heady fragrance of this flower.
Delhi is vividly present throughout, existing as a topography of shared stories and folk history. ‘Bus routes of Childhood’ is part map, part dictionary, a dense composite of personal history and the history of the city embedded in place names:
Definition and meaning are repeatedly interrupted with the stop-start structure, each revelation undermined by a revision (‘Can’t find any’) or pathos (‘Where the deer was killed’). It is this balancing act that makes Vital Signs so compelling: any simplicity promised in the sensuality of his lyrical evocations is undercut by a complexity and strangeness that lingers in the mind long after reading.
I was glad to be proven wrong, however, and was struck by the frequent moments of originality and beauty of this collection. If not entirely free of the trappings of sentimentality, Goswami’s collection certainly made me rethink my assumptions about writing that wears its heart on its sleeve. There is something deeply poignant and touching in his appeal for taking stock of life’s sensory pleasures. Sincerity is also unfairly regarded as being naturally antithetical to intellectual rigour or artistic experimentation, something Rishi Dastidar points to in his blurb for Vital Signs, in which he notes Goswami’s attention to ‘that most unfashionable of qualities — a sense of grace’. Goswami’s intermingling of prayerful evocations of the everyday with carefully wrought, intellectually curious considerations of empire, otherness, and the complex histories of language push back against any reservations of mine that foregrounding the emotional means stifling the political.
Vital Signs is a deeply spiritual work in which the quotidian becomes holy. Descriptions of cooking, tasting and selecting ingredients are central to the collection, and elicit the same meditative calm and sensory pleasure as good food writing. In ‘How to peel the perfect potato’, we are invited into the speaker’s kitchen:
For now I will only speak of potatoes.
How to peel them in a perfect circle
Keep all their eyes in place.
How to scrape the skin of thought
Make dance patterns on the floor.
How to chop beans so green
They leave little marks on the heart.
Cooking combines richness with ritual. Goswami’s poems of intimacy and invitation force you to slow down, and once you do there is a slow accumulation of meaning through tender observation.
There are startling and original lines too; Goswami creates a compelling mystery and strangeness that borders on disassociation. At first glance the collection is replete with aphorisms and life lessons, valuable for its evocation of family, community, and simple pleasures. But there is something stranger straining at the heart of these poems. In ‘Heart’, he writes:
Mechanic of body and soul, an everyday thump
Like a bear coming out of cloud, to the road below.
You are not faint of _
If you have it, you have everything.
Goswami makes use of aphorism and the balanced cadence of riddle — ‘if you have it, you have everything’, making the poem at once declarative and enigmatic. By signifying ‘heart’ with an underscore Goswami turns absence into presence; lines that feel aphoristic (and therefore willing to yield their meaning easily) are also surreal and withholding. Hollowing out aphorism destabilises the meaning: we reach for the expected word (here ‘heart’ after ‘you are not faint of _’) but it is withheld. I love the line, ‘Like a bear coming out of cloud’: the fairytale strangeness is striking in its simplicity, and such an interesting evocation of a heartbeat, of unexpected revelation, or of stealthy desires that catch us unawares.
There are many ‘object’ poems in the collection in which the premise is apparently simple, an address to a plant or animal, but from which Goswami draws out associative meanings so that you’re really reading about Delhi, about India more broadly, about relationships, about ‘Life’, as he promised at the beginning of the collection. In ‘Saptaparni’, the speaker describes the fragrance and beauty of the plant sometimes called ‘devil’s weed’.
They say this is an addiction, the lure of the flower, the lost lover.
But I don’t believe that, just as I don’t believe the forest dweller who crosses you
In a hurry, for to wait a moment longer has its perils.
Just as I don’t believe in the clock with its many arms talking about daylight
And I can’t believe that your bark is a scholar’s desk, writing furious.
For now, Saptaparni, you are nothing but a breath that fills my city in the evening
Did I say my city? Delhi is never my city
Again, we have evocation through negation; Goswami tells us about the folklore surrounding saptaparni plants but swiftly follows with ‘But I don’t believe that’, a repeated assertion that becomes a resistance to the delineation of time and order, here surreally figured as ‘the clock with its many arms’. Delhi is at once ‘my city’ and ‘never my city’, alive principally to the speaker through the heady fragrance of this flower.
Delhi is vividly present throughout, existing as a topography of shared stories and folk history. ‘Bus routes of Childhood’ is part map, part dictionary, a dense composite of personal history and the history of the city embedded in place names:
Pan Bazaar: Betel leaf bazaar. Books housed in childhood.
Aath gaon: Eight villages. Can’t find any.
Puronigudam: Old godown. Near ma’s place.
Palashbari: Garden of palash flowers. Dad’s place.
Khatiamari: Where the deer was killed.
Definition and meaning are repeatedly interrupted with the stop-start structure, each revelation undermined by a revision (‘Can’t find any’) or pathos (‘Where the deer was killed’). It is this balancing act that makes Vital Signs so compelling: any simplicity promised in the sensuality of his lyrical evocations is undercut by a complexity and strangeness that lingers in the mind long after reading.