‘Times are changing’

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Ejaz Rahim’s prolific verse projects him as a thinker endowed with the perceptions of a poet

 

‘Ejaz Rahim’s excellent academic career and rich public service experience coupled with an unmitigated artistic penchant tend to contribute enormously to the multi-layered but neat texture of his poems which in turn bear the stamp of his distinctive poetic style and verve.’

 

With a Pinch of Levity

Author: Ejaz Rahim

Publisher: Dost Publications, Plot 110, Street 15, I-9/2, Islamabad

Page: 207; Price: Rs.450/-

 

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Ejaz Rahim is a celebrated Pakistani poet writing in English, with some twenty-one published verse collections to his credit. His excellent academic career and rich public service experience coupled with an unmitigated artistic penchant tend to contribute enormously to the multi-layered but neat texture of his poems which in turn bear the stamp of his distinctive poetic style and verve.

His prolific verse projects him as a thinker endowed with the perceptions of a poet. He seems to be thinking all the time which would eventually lead to the assumption that his thought should control his poetry, or conversely, his poetry should control his thought. A poet, in effect, is not one who merely deals in ‘statements, arguments, proofs, teachings or persuasions’; he demonstrates or reveals. Nonetheless, the matter of thought may be his subject. Argument itself – at its best – may produce a sort of fire, an illumination revealing truth as a vision rather than an intellectual concept.

In the instant work, ER has sought to deliberate upon the wherewithal of the eventful diurnal existence that he (and by implication the whole humanity!) is destined to partake of in the wake of the selfsame statements, arguments, proofs, teachings or persuasions artistically enshrined in these poems. He scorns outworn images and clichés although he could have created an astonishing new effect by borrowing phrases from well-known poets.

What has been attributed to TS Eliot in the context of his art as a poet could, with equal pertinence, be extended to the poetics of ER that ‘He was to be precise not only in his use of words, but also in the exact, wonderful fitting of their sound to his meaning. There is often a kind of slow stillness in the speech as of a voice far away beyond a mountain, utterly impersonal, interrupted sometimes by a colloquialism which brings the voice suddenly near, close to the earth, so that we have a startling contrast between two aspects of the thought – and thus a new imaginative synthesis.’

Far from being a symbolist, the poet here circumvents his outpourings with a plenitude of platitudinous truths designed to disclaim aberrations of all sorts like avarice, bigotry, deceit, exploitation, favouritism, fraud, graft, hypocrisy, injustice, obscurantism, ostentation, perjury, self-aggrandisement, violence, vulgarity et al. Thus without pretending to be a pulpiteer, he adumbrates truths which bring into focus the seamy side of contemporaneity with ‘a pinch of levity’, so to say. An ingenuous Pitrasesque irony unlike Swift’s sardonic irony, permeates the contours of ER’s verse lending it a measure of positivistic credulity denied to many a versifier in the contemporary literary milieu.

‘An ingenuous Pitrasesque irony unlike Swift’s sardonic irony, permeates the contours of ER’s verse lending it a measure of positivistic credulity denied to many a versifier in the contemporary literary milieu.’

 

Most of the poems included in the book would seem to testify to the foregoing contention. Selected excerpts from the collection are reproduced here with a view to reinforcing the point:

These poems are inscribed/To fill my own personal void/And relieve the pain of existing/In an unjust order/Through times that are unfair (Preface in Verse)

Such are the times/One feels ante-dated/Or simply out of joint/Like last year’s calendar/Vegetating on a wall (These Days)

Light and love/ Have a common predisposition/To be straight/Avoiding distractions/And deflections (Straight Line)

The dream is larger/Than the poem/That it inspires/And the poem/Bigger than the poet/Caught in the wedge/Between the poet/And his dream. (Dream, Poem and Poet)

From German dialecticians/To Chinese philosophers/The fine symbiosis/Of bread and faith/Is best exposed/When simply juxtaposed (Faith and Bread)

Death is a/A life-saving paradox/A life-defining oxymoron

It is one stitch/That saves nine. (Death as a Paradox)

There is no market for poems/When all trends turn/Inflationary (No Market for Poems)

Times are changing, dear/And tongues have grown adept/At chewing the clandestine

Truth snipes these days/Like guerilla bands/From behind hill-poems

Emptiness is sovereign/Sitting armed/Under everybody’s skin (Times are Changing)

Truth is a permanent casualty/To the delight/Of insurance firms/And brokerage companies/Who would go broke/If Truth were injury-proof/Against all contingencies. (Permanent Casualty)

Fear and hatred sit/Like hidden fascists/In democratic settings./Ethics and character/Nobility and soberness/Sleep like mummies/Of Egypt’s pharaohs/In museum casings.

Even today/Despite wonders of science/And technological leaps/A small brush with reality/Simply outweighs/The corpus of truth encountered/In tablets and compendiums.

The scales of reality/Do not tally/With the score of truth./There is eternal see-sawing/And flip-flopping/In the order of things. (Directionless Lines)

Lest one should lose sight of the trail of the cardinal theme of these poems, it would not be inappropriate to conclude this appraisal by re-citing a few lines from the Preface: Which brings me back to Levity/Which is a poetic modality/Where you don’t paraphrase/Your message but just/Pick up an axe and do it/Like Lady Macbeth/Instead of wasting your breath/Like Prince Hamlet.