Poetry of Moods
“Restless Soul” by Ravinder Ravi. Indo-Canadian Publishers, Surrey, Canada . Pp.96, 4 dollars
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No two poets should be more different from each other. Ravinder Ravi and H.K. Kaul are
the same age but how different they are! Indeed one finds it difficult to believe that they
are contemporaries of North Indian extract and write in English – which is not their
mother tongue. While Ravi is an experimentalist, a painter of moods and moments in the
surrealistic mode, Kaul is a solid essayist in verse.
“Restless Soul” is a slim volume by a poet who has already made a name as a poet in
Punjabi. A gifted poet, Ravi believes that: “creation is a creative self of the writer”and
his poems invariably are autobiographies of the moment of creation. In this he is more
akin to the continental poets of the post-War period than with his contemporary poets in
Punjabi.
“I went down the drain
Stiff, I plugged it.”
This is how the title poem begins. Going through the inevitable tangle of “muscular
thighs” and the “rainbow breaking a spectrum”, the poem reaches the crescendo of
orgasm, where :
“Ï could not hold
Like a fountain
I gushed out
Like a volcano I erupted.”
A graphic account of the coital spasm, says the uninitiated. A good poem, says the
modern non-academic critic. But Ravi is not always the orgasm-seeking sex-maniac. He
is a nihilist. Sex to him is but a drain, albeit an essential one. He shatters values, pulls
down traditions, kills orthodoxies. He is “anti” – incarnate:
“Let us go
Burn the city
Make the forest green!”
could be said only by a whirlwind.
From “Restless Soul” to “A New Journey” is a change from the Lawrencian religion of
the blood to the macrological pleonasm of a speech writer.
Satyapal Anand,
-Excerpts from: “Poetry of Moods”-
The Tribune, May 19, 1979