T.R.Joy

In 2001 Allied Publishers, Mumbai brought out my book of poems, Brooding in a Wound. My English translations of O.N.V. Kurup’s Malayalam poems have been included in K. Satchidanandan’s Gestures: An Anthology of South Asian Poetry, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1996 and in A. J. Thomas’s This Ancient Lyre (Selected Poems by ONV Kurup), Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2005. Some of the translations of my own poems in English have been published in Nagara Kavitha series of anthologies in Malayalam brought out by Kavitha Samithi, Mumbai. A few Marathi translations of my English poems have appeared in Akshar Chalval and Janparivar.

Critical and creative works, translations and cultural features have appeared in journals and periodicals:

• Indian Literature, Chandrabhaga, New Quest, Kavya Bharati, The Bombay Literary Review, Poiesis, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Haritham, The Brown Critique, The Literary Panorama, Poetry Chain, The Beam, The Indian P.E.N., Literature Alive;
• The Illustrated Weekly of India, Gentleman, Debonair;
• The Times of India, The Hindu, Amrita Bazaar Patrika, The Independent.

 I was the publisher and associate editor of Poiesis, a journal of the Poetry Circle, Mumbai.

 I have submitted my Ph.D. dissertation on the Secular Aesthetics of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry at the Postgraduate Department of English, University of Mumbai. I teach at the Department of English, Loyola College, Chennai. My wife, Dr Usha Antony is an Assistant Professor, Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University, Chennai. We have a daughter, Nithila.

Some of my Poems in English

Let me give you two poems from my book, Brooding in a Wound and three of my recent ones published in Kavya Bharati, Number 18, 2006, pp. 54 – 56.

• A POETRY WORKSHOP

The whole evening I stared at this page
paring off its blankness.

A poem can come from anywhere, they say.
Then a prose poem shouldn’t be that tough.
But no striking image
that looked straight out of the skull
with its glint of gold
streaking down the morning sun.
There must be some way I can spot metaphors
that strike the right poise for the occasion.
(Not the romantic stuff
anybody would want to chuck out.)

This room has enough light,
books soiled by searching thumbs,
antique furniture quiet as baked mud –
anything that can kindle a poet.

There’s no use sitting here anymore.
Let me go across and scratch
the back of the tree there;
sniff the stink that laces the pavement,
beg of the leper the feel
falling off one’s fingers.

Across the street two garden chairs,
one empty of its usual breathing,
watch the ailing sky
pasted on a high-rise window.

Maybe I should give up for today,
burn this sheet in a silver pot.
The quiddity of ash on my forehead
might remind you of the right script
another time.

• AN ART GALLERY

The pride of the victor
stood rooted in blood.
My ancestor’s phantom-limb
fell off from a shoulder,
never made it across the hill.

Best-sellers ready to be pulped
adorned the dusty foyer
parting our ways.
The canoe and the doll
stranded on muddied papyrus waves
boded the ogre of the day.

A grating turbo engine
invades our canvas,
profaning the tabernacle.
It’s the blasphemy of our times:
The song and the stars,
the earth and the sky,
the mud in the blood,
birds, beasts and babies -- 
bulldozed into the margins.

G-stringed and long-limbed,
the ebony mannequin
strikes an angled poise
velvetted in elegant nudity.

The well, framed on the wall,
a wide-eyed blue icicle
snug on the furrowed brow
a medieval landscape assigns it.
The village well, however,
the cyclonic rage
uprooted and denuded,                      
a sore thumb on the beach
savaged and blanked by the sea.                      

Nobody owns anything here,
mouthed a mighty dragon
groping for a rickety prayer-wheel,
installed for public gaze and grace.

Tears harden into stalactites
inside the chilly caves of terror.
Bones brown in the marrow of a soul,
as demons scamper up the mural
scared of light’s fearless flicker.
A candle at prayer fills an ocean,
kindling the evening hope.
The habitual rattle of words
thins into a muffled whisper
focusing our inner resonance.
A poem endures the claws
bared between nightmares,
tattooed on a vagrant brain.

Thoughts liquid as cats
migrate to well-combed fields,
oiled in twilight musk and grey.
The moon, a swollen nipple,
doesn’t calm the passion,
the mirror’s unkind stare.

I give up the search
as the rain plays the music,                   
the hillside awash in green.                               
The river in full spate
wakes up a rainbow,
an ecstatic wind,
the legend of a thandav.

It’s creation again.

3. REMEMBERING NISSIM EZEKIEL

A regular Friday
after a Poetry Circle reading –
a coincidence, may be.

It was at the restaurant
we got the news.
Then the sudden silence,

the murmur of memories.

A sagging line across his room
gathers a few clothes,
wet and bewildered.

The last time we met
he smiled as usual
wearing the unrest gracefully,

lost in the struggle.

A troubled dream
among those unhinged lives,
he fumbled with pen and paper

realigning some more psalms
lingering in tangled nerves
to reclaim the voice

misplaced elsewhere.

What is a dead poet?
Cells dissolved in print,
a lapsed riot of metaphors ?

Ripe within the dark
without the distorting lights,
the seed can wait

for the next wind and the rain.

4. THE REAL BUSINESS 

Archiving destiny’s breathless ways,
tongues and tales ferment ancient scrolls
ripening in secret cellars
guarded by mystical sand dunes.

A dry stick of the covenant,
the relic of a rare miracle,
never sprouts a spring on the rock,
a promise lost in the desert.

Those chosen conspire with demons,
bloody the land and its people.
The prophet’s cry hangs on the cross
startled by God’s own betrayal.

The Holy of Holies tore the veil,
and the people’s temple buckled;
the flaming new sign on the sky,
squandered by their own feuding gods.

Between Abraham and Isaac,
the knife and the bullet change hands;
and the Lord’s voice can’t intervene
bullish stakes and capital bargains.

The prodigal doesn’t stand a chance;
the eldest has honed his cunning.
He won’t bet on old parables,
to prospect today’s salvation.

Sermons and services on the web,
credit emailed on change of heart;
the New Gospel of the virtual,
a slick trade on our PC’s.

No more arid trails to paradise,
nor the Shaman’s dance in the wind.
No gypsy chieftain can herd
the storms of our turbulent lands.

The soul is a groping smoke
the body, heavy and ashen;
we can’t hold it any longer,
the fine sheen of an illusion.

the kiss
that stays
in the solitude
together

the blaze
in their eyes
that wakes up
the night
the moon
 
then

a smile
half-opens

tattooed
on an ecstasy

reluctant
to miss it all

?