The Microcosmology of the Senses
Amlanjyoti Goswami, A Different Story
Poetrywala, 254pp, £16.00, ISBN 9788198443793
reviewed by Frith Taylor
Amlanjyoti Goswami’s latest collection A Different Story returns to themes explored in previous work, which I think might be best described as a kind of secular spirituality. Meditations on the beauty of Delhi and the importance of poetry itself are conduits for deep feeling through which the speaker expresses a wish for connection. I have previously suggested that Goswami’s work is concerned with sincerity, but A Different Story clarifies his poetic vision, which I would argue becomes explicitly sentimental, joining the ranks of ‘Up Lit’ in its response to global crises. Gone is much of the lyricism of previous work, and in its place is an ambitious bid for connection through simple storytelling.
Goswami’s work is strongest when he eschews narration, sharpening images down to sensory detail. For example, in ‘Now, can you describe a papaya?’ the speaker describes
This is the archetypal Goswami poem, an extended metaphor realised in painterly detail and concluding with a gentle turn or proposition. The lines ‘blessed with/ Worldly wisdom’ begin to strain towards the sentimental, but the poem otherwise coheres around a richly realised evocation of sensory contrast in which food is language, or language is food, the embodied basis for community, culture and neighbourliness.
As with Up Lit in general, the collection’s sentimentality can be broadly described as writing about nice things in order to illuminate the threads that connect us, reminding readers of things that make life worth living. In Goswami’s poetry, community is forged by reminding readers of nice things like books, children, butterflies, fruit and dreams. Humanity comes in the form of the broad internationalism of literacy drives and writers’ conferences, interspersed here and there with figures from Indian mythology or historical luminaries. Literature is particularly important; speakers in the collection grab a new book ‘like a treasure, a rainbow of surprise’ or fly ‘on a cloud/ Like a poem by Wordsworth’. Dreams abound; in one poem a dream is knitted ‘with bare hands’, the speaker has a ‘dream/ Of doing things differently’ and a ‘dream of going somewhere’, while in another poem sees ‘a butterfly dreaming a rainbow’.
I’ve struggled to really pin down what I object to in sentimentality. It is often simply invoked as a byword for middlebrow, and certainly I am wary of dismissing art as ‘sentimental’ because so frequently this just means something associated with the world of women and emotion, namely children, comfort, pets or food. It is my unfashionable view that there’s nothing wrong with nice poems about life-enhancing activities, just so long as we’re careful not to elide form with moral value; simplicity does not equate to accessibility, for example.
Historically, sentimentality has been a form of transcendence, evoking an aura of feeling around the sentimental subject as a means of marshalling emotion in service of a cause. I’m thinking primarily of Charles Dickens’s luminous visions of domestic harmony or the deaths of noble orphans — it was through narrative excess that he tried to make his case for the humanity of London’s urban poor through their capacity for suffering. While the writer may have a noble cause in mind, it is sentimentality’s coercion that is its main problem; we resist its pull because the mechanics are too visible.
Goswami’s focus on the zone of immediate experience (cooking, tasting, walking, looking, etc.) makes a case for cherishing the everyday. A Different Story runs into trouble, however, with the broad reach of this work, where experiences of acute suffering are articulated in a sentimental mode. Problems with A Different Story are problems with Up Lit, which contains a number of premises it cannot uphold. It purports to reach across cultural borders, proposing that we have more that unites than divides us, and yet the cultural other remains, now as a kind of spectacle.
This sense of spectacle is particularly clear in the poem ‘The child bride learns to read a story’. The poem describes the education of a child by her father-in-law, and as with other poems the reader is asked to consider language as quasi-spiritual experience. Literacy constitutes a transcendental imaginary in which ‘she is free/ To roam the world of letters’. In keeping with the broad humanitarian slant of the collection, much of the poem feels like copy from a UN initiative for educating girls; literacy will ‘shape her destiny’, a transformative legacy through which she is able to uplift her female descendants who become ‘scholars and writers, poets and philosophers.’ Parenthood, like literacy, is a redemptive experience, and the poem works hard to skate over the events necessary for this to happen, namely the impregnation of a child. This reality is crammed uncomfortably into the line ‘The child bride becomes a mother’ which unintentionally speaks a kind of muted horror, derailing the poem’s eulogy for literacy.
Goswami’s work is at its best when concerned with the microcosmology of the senses, secular-spiritual evocations of the richness of everyday life. A Different Story has the occasional flashes of strangeness and eccentric phrasing that made Vital Signs (2022) interesting. In a poem about a musician playing the surbahar the speaker believes that humanity depends on ‘Feeling clouds the arms of tomorrow’ while in ‘Silk’ the beauty of the material is evoked through other sensory experiences: ‘Salty guava, trinkets of fire, a flowing river’. It is through the richness of these compressed images and the speaker’s delight in nature and art that Goswami most convincingly makes his bid for connection.
Goswami’s work is strongest when he eschews narration, sharpening images down to sensory detail. For example, in ‘Now, can you describe a papaya?’ the speaker describes
Green pips of meaning
White sap dripping
Down the bark of door
Where clumps hang like flowers
Pear shaped, blessed with
Worldly wisdom, but better endowed
[…]
And that spiky bark, running through palm
Tastes bitter
[…]
And you wait to tell neighbours
If it should be curry today, soft and tender
Mixed with potato, unpeeled in the basket
Or if we should wait for a plate filled with nature
Next to those eggs, scrambling humid as a vocabulary.
This is the archetypal Goswami poem, an extended metaphor realised in painterly detail and concluding with a gentle turn or proposition. The lines ‘blessed with/ Worldly wisdom’ begin to strain towards the sentimental, but the poem otherwise coheres around a richly realised evocation of sensory contrast in which food is language, or language is food, the embodied basis for community, culture and neighbourliness.
As with Up Lit in general, the collection’s sentimentality can be broadly described as writing about nice things in order to illuminate the threads that connect us, reminding readers of things that make life worth living. In Goswami’s poetry, community is forged by reminding readers of nice things like books, children, butterflies, fruit and dreams. Humanity comes in the form of the broad internationalism of literacy drives and writers’ conferences, interspersed here and there with figures from Indian mythology or historical luminaries. Literature is particularly important; speakers in the collection grab a new book ‘like a treasure, a rainbow of surprise’ or fly ‘on a cloud/ Like a poem by Wordsworth’. Dreams abound; in one poem a dream is knitted ‘with bare hands’, the speaker has a ‘dream/ Of doing things differently’ and a ‘dream of going somewhere’, while in another poem sees ‘a butterfly dreaming a rainbow’.
I’ve struggled to really pin down what I object to in sentimentality. It is often simply invoked as a byword for middlebrow, and certainly I am wary of dismissing art as ‘sentimental’ because so frequently this just means something associated with the world of women and emotion, namely children, comfort, pets or food. It is my unfashionable view that there’s nothing wrong with nice poems about life-enhancing activities, just so long as we’re careful not to elide form with moral value; simplicity does not equate to accessibility, for example.
Historically, sentimentality has been a form of transcendence, evoking an aura of feeling around the sentimental subject as a means of marshalling emotion in service of a cause. I’m thinking primarily of Charles Dickens’s luminous visions of domestic harmony or the deaths of noble orphans — it was through narrative excess that he tried to make his case for the humanity of London’s urban poor through their capacity for suffering. While the writer may have a noble cause in mind, it is sentimentality’s coercion that is its main problem; we resist its pull because the mechanics are too visible.
Goswami’s focus on the zone of immediate experience (cooking, tasting, walking, looking, etc.) makes a case for cherishing the everyday. A Different Story runs into trouble, however, with the broad reach of this work, where experiences of acute suffering are articulated in a sentimental mode. Problems with A Different Story are problems with Up Lit, which contains a number of premises it cannot uphold. It purports to reach across cultural borders, proposing that we have more that unites than divides us, and yet the cultural other remains, now as a kind of spectacle.
This sense of spectacle is particularly clear in the poem ‘The child bride learns to read a story’. The poem describes the education of a child by her father-in-law, and as with other poems the reader is asked to consider language as quasi-spiritual experience. Literacy constitutes a transcendental imaginary in which ‘she is free/ To roam the world of letters’. In keeping with the broad humanitarian slant of the collection, much of the poem feels like copy from a UN initiative for educating girls; literacy will ‘shape her destiny’, a transformative legacy through which she is able to uplift her female descendants who become ‘scholars and writers, poets and philosophers.’ Parenthood, like literacy, is a redemptive experience, and the poem works hard to skate over the events necessary for this to happen, namely the impregnation of a child. This reality is crammed uncomfortably into the line ‘The child bride becomes a mother’ which unintentionally speaks a kind of muted horror, derailing the poem’s eulogy for literacy.
Goswami’s work is at its best when concerned with the microcosmology of the senses, secular-spiritual evocations of the richness of everyday life. A Different Story has the occasional flashes of strangeness and eccentric phrasing that made Vital Signs (2022) interesting. In a poem about a musician playing the surbahar the speaker believes that humanity depends on ‘Feeling clouds the arms of tomorrow’ while in ‘Silk’ the beauty of the material is evoked through other sensory experiences: ‘Salty guava, trinkets of fire, a flowing river’. It is through the richness of these compressed images and the speaker’s delight in nature and art that Goswami most convincingly makes his bid for connection.