Ejaz Rahim is a celebrated English language poet from Pakistan with some twenty verse collections to his credit. Heroism and love are regarded as the elemental constituents of his verse. His credentials and exploits as a brilliant academic, a conscientious civil servant, a dedicated quasi-political celebrity, and a distinguished poet are verily remarkable, nay enviable. Added to that is his catholicity of tastes and interests, and an amiable temperament.
Ejaz Rahim’s spouse Nazie Rahim, herself a scholar and an adept connoisseur of the arts, has recently brought out a selection from his poetry titled The Best of Ejaz Rahim which has readily engaged the attention of the literary circles not only for the innate appeal of the selected material but also for its introduction couched in a language of love and unaffected estimation.
Anwar Dil is a noted scholar of the English language and literature having expatriated to the US in the early Nineteen Seventies. Presently he is based at the Alliant International University, San Diego, California (US) as its Professor Emeritus. He published his essay on how he saw him (ER) and his poems in the shape of a book titled Ejaz Rahim and His Poems – An Appreciation, on the eve of inauguration by Ejaz Rahim of the 2013 International Education Week, under the auspices of Confucius Institute and University of Toledo (US) where the latter had been invited to also read his widely acclaimed poem I, Confucius. The two works form the subject of this review.
The Best of Ejaz Rahim
Nazie Rahim has put together her choice of ER’s poetry from nineteen of his published verse collections viz, The Dreaming Clay Jar; The Imprisoned Air; Cactus in My Throat; Bits and Pieces of the Moon; Floating Landmarks; Suspended Animations; I, Buddha and other Poems; Door, Lock and Key: My Poems to Motherhood; Moon Rising with Mavera Poems; Not Poems but Arrows; Between the Kaaba and the Karakorams; Safwat Ghayur and other Poems; Snapshots of an Earthquake; I, Confucius and other Poems; Dear Maulana Sahib and other Poems; Poems and Portraits; Through the Eyes of the Heart; Roots at the Edge; and That Frolicsome Mosquito, Our Universe. ER’s latest verse collection Carnage in December is, however, excluded from this list as it was not yet published when Nazie Rahim’s was compiling her selection.
Noted American poet Archibald MacLeish’s concluding lines in his poem Ars Poetica, ‘A poem should not mean/But be’, as quoted by ER in the prologue to one of his books Roots at the Edge, poignantly translate the thematic ambience of his (ER’s) poetry. The poet in ER excels at coalescing, as it were, the figments of his fertile imagination with the unseemly actualities of life which unlike a metaphysical conceit would not intrigue or encumber the reader’s mind to prevent him from comprehending his poetic phraseology or syntax. His myriad themes speak eloquently for the rich variety of his experience and prosodic dexterity.
Here, the compiler has extracted 5-6 poems at an average from all of his nineteen verse collections. In the same collection viz, Roots at the Edge, the author assumes that ‘I see life as a physical order but also as a moral framework. For me the human condition embraces both dimensions simultaneously’. So decay, loss, pain, and extinction are the seminal concerns of the poet in his verse. All along, therefore, he seems to be trying, in the line of his prototype MacLeish, to resolve the enigma, and paradox too, that a poem should be ‘motionless in time’, leaving ‘memory by memory the mind’ — finally tending to equate itself to ‘not true’. What is not true to fancy is actually true to the poetic mind capable of perceiving the truth through the pellucidity of reason. A few excerpts from the selected poems will illustrate the point:
Pain and suffering/Reduce mountains/To rubble – Nearby/The starving Buddha/Sits brooding/In the calm composure/Of a rock
Only a thin line/Divides/Commitment from indifference/Words cease/To flow
Swollen waters/Leave behind/Inverted banyan trees – So many landmarks/Float amidst the tumult/Of a flood
We who are ruin-deaf/Delude ourselves to think/We are listening/Across Taxilas of time.
Things that truly count/Are expressions of love/The resplendent Karakorams/Are a token of God’s radiance/Gifted to the world/But the walls of Ka’aba reflect/Man’s craving for the One/Beloved
We dig up old skeletons/And let fresh fires/Consume them/As insurance against/Future confessions.
It’s not our eyes/But hearts that are astray/If they discern nothing/Beyond nothingness/Not even/The bloom of the orchids/When violets decay.
But a verse – a verse/Must mean something/In love’s terse/Spark of utterance/Like the twitter of a bird
Existence is a glimmer/At the margins/Of emptiness
Nazie Rahim correctly avers that ‘the experience of joy and renewal through art cannot blot out the existence of pain and suffering in the external world’ as this world ‘still has the power to shake the entire tree of life with gusts of doubt and a deep sense of loss.’ In effect ER’s perception of life is not entrenched in any dream or hallucination; instead it is rooted in humanism which owes its sustenance to anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethics, and to a certain degree, aesthetics also that account for the artistic ambivalence, as alluded to by the Compiler in her introduction, characterising the bulk of ER’s poetic output.
Title: The Best of Ejaz Rahim
Selection: Nazie Rahim
Publisher: Dost Publications, Islamabad
Pages: 231; Price: Rs490/-
*****
Ejaz Rahim and His Poems – An Appreciation
Anwar Dil has sought to explore the person and art of Ejaz Rahim in this book as a thoughtful researcher. He has succinctly but quite lucidly reviewed fifteen of his verse collections in the light of a plethora of diverse critical judgement on them assimilated through difference sources. This is about the first part.
In the second part, the author has included the text of sixteen poems of ER with a view to acquainting the international readers of his poetics. These poems are purported to ‘reflect ER’s devotion to cross-cultural understanding and universal values for human excellence’.
The book also bears facsimile of some photographs that add to its readability. It would be instructive to conclude this appraisal with Khwaja Masud’s erudite critical view of ER’s person and poetry: ‘Ejaz Rahim is pre-eminently successful in providing us with genuine poetry which steers clear of the Scylla of abstractionism and Charybdis of naturalism, and is a harmonious combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as all great art is. … ER’s poems are composed of the stuff of eternity. ….. Undoubtedly the reader discovers in his verse an unending quest for meaning in a world where everything is in constant flux, where the pace of history is bewilderingly fast. ER is one of the true poets of the present generation.’
Title: Ejaz Rahim and his Poems – An Appreciation
Author: Anwar Dil
Publishers: Intercultural Forum, San Diego, California (US)/Dost Publications, Islamabad
Pages: 240; Price: US $30; Rs475/-
