Absent Muses by Sampurna Chattarji

Sampurna Chattarji's Absent Muses covers a wide swathe of experiences and sentiments. Reading her collection is a journey through the poetic consciousness as it encounters, contends with and finally captures the many different experiences of the writing subject. It is, as it were, a collection of collections, a collage of the different images we map onto the world. The recognizable characters that crowd her everyday reality are the muses that inspire poetry through their absences. Their conversations are like "alms" clutched tightly in the hand. She says she must read them later in open palms, even as sometimes they are swept clean by time, memory and, as it becomes acutely evident, geography. Chattarji's poems are strongly embedded in the dynamics of human friendship and relationships. Some of her poems directly speak to or about friendship and relationships but many are about their absence, or the shadow of their overwhelming former presence. In 'Translations', for example, we find a record of her relationship with the translated poet, whose overwhelming presence in her mind forces the despondent admission, "his words are escaping me" - she is not him, and yet it is his "letters on the page that are leaping into flame". The complexity of this relationship goes deep. The act of construing someone else's reality taps deep into the recesses of the translator's consciousness. She must reconstruct but her world is pre-determined.

Being the generous and prolific correspondent that she is, the poet records in 'Migration and the Mystery of Letters' something of the experience of exchanging letters and sharing conversations with friends. In another of her poems, 'The Assassin, the Arsonist and the Babykiller', Chattarji finds a beautiful set of images to reminisce about the three individuals referred to in the title (which refers to their impact as conversationalists or interlocutors), whose putative characteristics are so recognizably familiar, so acutely memorable, you could see them as archetypes for people in your own life. The assassin speaks infrequently, and always to deadly effect; the garrulous arsonist is explosive, "resorting to flamethrowers and detonators"; and the sullen babykiller has "written off the possibility of redemption".

In the collection, we also find an attempt to understand the abstractions in our lives. In 'Strategies of Silence', silence appears as pity, sorrow, rage, shame; 'Ciphers' speaks of the arbitrariness of daily portents, the anticipation of predictions; likewise, 'Auspicious Enough' captures that stifling need to wait for the propitious moment, when every moment is fraught with the reluctance to move. 'Who Calls That Strange?' is rooted in the politics of the country. The goddess of the poem chooses, almost nonchalantly, the bodies of the dismembered, from among those determinedly seeking "moksha". And 'No Shape Is More Constant' treads the site of the poisoned breast, the site of vulnerability.

'Hoping To Land' captures the exigencies of travel. In this section of the book, the poems convey a deep longing for travel, a strong reminder of the happiness of travel. The traveler confronts her own almost immediate sense of belonging ("map in our bones"), and her sense of shared camaraderie, but she must also intermittently confront her understanding of home. In 'August in Edinburgh', home is a fleeting figment - "We are dreaming of confined spaces/ walls that will comfort us". And yet, the traveler encounters home everywhere, in kitchen chatter, in absent hosts and familiar food. In the same section, the poems on Japan have a distinctly dreamy and quaint quality.

Home, therefore, is the last key (and perhaps most intricate) theme in the book. Home is portrayed differently in the different poems. There is Calcutta, there is Darjeeling, and perhaps equally significantly, there is the home that we find in literature - that ephemeral sense of belong that being immersed in literature generates, the home that we know intimately and yet never wholly possess. 'Where Do I Put This Love' tries to locate the different corners of the embodied home that could possibly hold and contain the poet's love for home. 'One or Two Things About Home' describes travels through space, literature, food, cups of tea and wine. "Every new/ Place is an open invitation to/ Disappointment..." It concludes with a reference to "the Hungarian who walked to Tibet and died in Darjeeling" and the consequent realization - "And the more I'd like to stay with Hangary, the more Darjeeling comes back - / the sound of Buddhist gongs, the stench of horse dung..."

Chattarji is a poet immersed in literature and her reading of the world is a distinctly literary one. It would definitely be interesting to read more critical material from her, her take on literary works, because she has a wide range of references and it reflects in her work. Absent Muses is, in part, an offering to the many literary influences that have shaped her work.