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| Edited By: DNA Sunday Team |Source: DNA |Updated: Feb 03, 2018, 10:13 PM IST
CAPITALS: A Poetry Anthology is a chronicle of a passionate, well-traveled life, bustling with the energy of invention.
This 340-page book, anthologised by Abhay K, a poet and diplomat, celebrates what Jorge Luis Borges called the ‘lucid pleasures of thought’. It is for people looking not for a Lonely Planet guidebook to the world, with advice and facts, but for the atmosphere of faraway places that are at once alien and familiar to anyone whose heart beats with the pulse of a metropolis.
CAPITALS, published by Bloomsbury, is a compilation of poetry on 185 of the 200-odd capital cities of the world, making it a poetry atlas of interest to frequent travelers and armchair dreamers alike. This book takes the reader on a journey into the history of places and the essence of human existence, told by people whose lives are intertwined with the life of their city.
In Tendency Toward Vagrancy, Philip Nikolayev marries tales of his waywardness as a child in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, with the history of this erstwhile Soviet town. His writing about how he used to cause his mother consternation is humorous and sad. He ends his poem with the lines:
Of course, back then I didn’t understand anything: neither how a poet harms his mother,nor how alienated (thank you, Marx, for that term) one can be from the start, and free in the grip of that greatest paradox of all— a happy Soviet childhood.
Cities resemble different kinds of people at different times. A city could be a lover or a friend. So Amsterdam is seen by the poet Joris Lentra as a man, while Kathmandu as a woman. Denize Lauture writes about Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince that she (the city) “grew up to become a pretty woman/With luscious lips…”
Through poetry, the reader experiences how a city feels. In a throbbing metropolis, one can know loneliness that is more consuming than the solitude of a troglodyte in his cave. It is the sensation of an empty heart with nothing to look forward to. Rethabile Masilo writes in the poem Maseru, Love about the capital of Lesotho:
Once, when winter was refusing to leave and spring could not push it out, and never could a season stay as long as that, I spent days on Kingsway sitting on the street railing.
You need not be a lover of poetry to read this book, but if you do indulge the poets here, you would be tempted to appreciate the magic in a masterfully constructed line. Try the opening of Derek Walcott’s poem on Castries, the capital of a Caribbean country called St Lucia, titled A City’s Death by Fire:
After that hot gospeller has leveled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire; Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
Abhay K’s own poems in the volume are a bit disappointing, perhaps because one is expecting so much from them. Many are mere descriptions of cities and fail to capture their spirits. His poem on Juba, the capital of South Sudan, has the lines:
The hill Jebel Kujur watches the old Nile flow silently through the new capital who could think the Greeks founded Juba at a place infested with strife and malaria.
That said, his poems have a haiku-like quality in that they are snapshots of spaces and their histories. The poet grew up in Bihar and studied Geography at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University before joining the Indian Foreign Service. He has a strong nose for politics and history, which is reflected in the anthology. CAPITALS is above all a great idea, and it took a person of many disciplines to put it together.
