Dr. Molly Joseph
Name of book: Calliope’s leaves
Author : Dr K B Razdan
As a post, postmodern text that reverberates on the random, uncertain shores of contemporaneity Calliope’s Leaves offers the world through the word. It was deep drowning experience hovering round the thick iceberg of this ocean! Here I emerge having gathered parts of it, illumining my inscape. This is indeed a masterpiece by Dr. K.B Razdan, who is soaked in the wisdom of ages by his deft forays into ancient myths and legends, great writers thinkers and movers. There in the pantheon we rub against Shakespeare, Milton, Jonathan Swift, Khalil Gibran, Jean Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud and many others.
Reading, delving deep into the book is a real experience in itself… As Gibran puts it the wet feathers of yours shudder, ‘like the naked leaf in the winter wind.’
Calliope, the Greek Goddess of eloquence and Epic Poetry fans her leafy poetic flakes all over the precious pebbles that have been gathered from the seashore of experience, and sediments wisdom. The book breathes in an out a uniqueness, it weaves out a magic web of tapestries, teems with thoughts, images, poems and poetic drama, interweaving the timeless of history with the temporal and spatial, multi layered with insights and interpretations of a revisit to renew things in tandem with our times.
If creativity evolves fine saturation of the past, spreading it on the quick sands of the present to blow it over to the expanding horizons of future, here is poet approximating that ‘time less’ with his own mediation mavericks.
He puts it succinctly in The Kind Creator (Poem 2, Page 3)
The lord cast his divine grace
Upon myself…
To reinvigorate my existence
To give it a meaning, a Purpose, direction
After exposing Narcissus’s psyche of cocooning in Solipsism (Poem 6) the self critical scrutiny is strong in Caged Bird. Here man’s anthropocentric cage building, hegemony is put to ridicule. The poem turns self reflexive.
‘As the apex of creation, man thinks he can lord over all creations?
Aren’t we caged in our bodies/ yes mind sets too caged,
Get going. Bury the cage,
Break the bars: fly to carefree freedom…
(Poem 7, Page 11)
How the voyaging self wants to be a Time Traveller, ducking in and out of the folds of history, witnessing ‘epic wars’ floating on the melody of Krishna’s flute and launch cosmic cruises across Galaxies Nebulas, Constellations. Calliope’s Leaves fall, flutter over, catching the random, be it on dreams, the mundane memories. This splash of the contemporary spices up the verses that flow sometimes from the prosaic into fine lyrical cadence
Men, women changed in wedlock/ making a mockery of sanctified, avowed matrimony” (Love Triangles, Poem page,7)
See expressions like ‘exploring fictional cosmos within.’ (Poem 11)
The Poetic Dramas that interweave within the matrix, do not project ‘discord’.
Everywhere, reinventing, redefining on ‘the given’, goes on with fine poetic flourish. Faustus, the human who made a bad bargain with Satan through Mephistopheles, still pits his brain against the evil when once again he is enjoined and entrusted with the malignant schemes of Lustus – to execute the satanic road map of monomaniacal ruination among humans, severing man’s faith in God, stigmatising God for all suffering.
It was at Faustus’ connivance that the Pandemic was thrashed out in his workshop filled with chemicals. Here how the nihilistic waves devour the contemporary.
‘the mono maniacal breeds of barking humans, akin to rabid dogs, in a cacophony of pain, hopelessness, hysteria and self annihilation… (Dr. Faustus…Post Modern Incarnation, page 36)
The Poetic Drama, Shakespeare and Anne Hath way… A Tryst with Destiny is a fine creative poetic dramatization of Shakespeare’s last days. The diction suits Shakespearean style and in a touching way there is the unveiling of the dramatic start of Shakespeare’s conjugal bliss which later in a realistic way, get swayed over by Shakespeare’s absorption of his whole self into theatre. The torn self of Shakespeare is poignant to the core when he suffers the death of his only son, Hamnet. These dark days proved to be the time of his dark tragedies too. Here the play makes tangible impact through poignant scenes where we find Shakespeare’s family reel under so much of distress and loss. The very epitaph Shakespeare writes pulsates with this. ‘Oh William Shakespeare, son of John live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee.’
With these last words, Shakespeare, with his soul twirling as an autumn leaf to fall, makes his to the other world.
The play captures us in all its poignancy, with poor Anne weeping over the loss…
‘where has thou gone leaving thy Anne forlorn as a lost eve on a grassy expanse, to be devoured by a wolf?’
The Poetic Drama, The Judgement of Paris connotes more than mere abduction of Helen, the wife of the Spartan King, Menelaus by Paris. In fact Paris was a mere instrument of the forces from above, the Gods who chose him to become, the arbiter of beauty when a contest was held among three Goddesses. His judgement resulted in getting Helen as his love, since he judged Aphrodite (Venus), the Goddess of Love as the winner. The offer came from her to Paris, that the paramount beauty of Sparta, Helen would be his.
There accrued the great Trojan war and consequently the destruction of so many precious human lives. Thus as Shakespeare puts it, ‘as flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods.’ – man a mere puppet in the hands of destiny wreaking destruction all around! The play teems with profundities, gives more what meets the eye.
Here is a daring poetic mind boldly interrogating old truisms posited by thinkers or religious codes.
‘When Krishna made Arjuna to kill Karna,
consigning conscience to the cleaners,
was it justified?
Apparently not!’.
Here is a poetic self always on a quest to question and re interpret the given time old concepts and notions. (Poems 18, 19, 21)
The poem Borderline Consciousness well analyses what constitute consciousness.
‘It is a flexible mind, a viscous brain an elastic thinking (Poem 31)
Interrogations continue in Poems like My Freer Self, Situations, Prevarications where there is a powerful critiquing of each through different angles.
A tongue in the cheek is there as motif in many poems (Anatomy of Bullying, page 57). We cannot stop laughing over poetic coinages like ‘verbal diarrhoea’ (Thinkers and Prattlers, page 180) We get virulent bytes of social criticism and correction in Mammon Worship, Cross and Owls, Mind Games, Confidence Tricksters. Social satire is pungent in the Poem, Republic of Dogs (page 62). Anatomy of Pain well analyses how patience matters in healing and the inner physician treats and heals your illness.
The Love poems, 78, 79, 95 teem with genuine warmth and intimacy. A futuristic poem like ‘Cassandra’ denoting man’s wreck less indulgence with technology, specially Artificial Intelligence as insane as the Trojans who proceed with the
Trojan Horse of destruction, flouting the warnings of Cassandra (poem 88, page 193) the Prophet of Doom. If we proceed that way, a graveyard awaits, a graveyard even in the Milky Way of Galaxy, the poet reminds us.
The Poetic self, sheds it veneers like a snake peeling off its skin, when we read Broken dreams, Talking to God (page 47, 48). They are deeply introspective. Held up in a ‘victim’s psyche strait jacket’, the soul talks to God across the terrains of mind and God listens in silence and puts him by the still waters. (page 33).
‘His Grace, his finger touches me, invigorates me.’
Great life lessons are meted out in poems like ‘Daedalus And Icarus’ (page 157). The Poem, Life: An Unchartered Journey (page 76) gives us insights core to our existence.
‘Play the see – saw of existence across/ the high way of life.’ (Page 178). Yes, proper balancing Matters.
The Razdan Poetics thus points at safe mooring for us, the ships in search of safe anchors in the turbulent seas.
Calliope’s Leaves fan, flutter over, in and around us with its gentle ripples, wafting in cool fresh air and insights.
Readers! Breath in and out…
Its fragrance so fresh and new.
(The author is Poet, Reviewer, Retd. Professor, Dept of English St. Xavier’s College, Aluva, Kerala)
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