First Infinities

by Vijay Nambisan

When Vijay Nambisan's poems appeared in a two-poet volume in 1992, Dom Moraes said the work was "an indication that Indian poetry, after many years of striving, ha(d) at last arrived at maturity." That volume is now out of print. More than two decades later, Nambisan delivers his first full-length collection, in which learning and insight are animated by lightness of touch and an unmistakeable tone. Nambisan's view of humankind is bleak, his view of the possibilities of poetry even bleaker. The gods are lonely and turned away by 'the mobs . at every border', and no amount of poetry can breathe life into a dying city. We have art so that we may not perish by the truth, Nietzsche says, and Nambisan's art is of the highest order, a reminder of what English-language poetry in India can do when the language is handled with skill and passion by someone who is so clearly in love with it, in all its moods, from sombre to playful, from dark to light. This love is on display in every page of First Infinities, whose every line is worthy of his great precursors--'Arun and Dom and Nissim'--whom Nambisan so lovingly invokes in the book's opening poem. - Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Vijay Nambisan's sensuous, intelligent, and often unsettling poems are parables for the time we live in now, without in any way being portentous or just topical. Nambisan appears to achieve his mix of the reporter's sense of being present at an important event or moment with the artist's refracted relationship with meaning through his preoccupation with formal design and mythic allusion. In poems such as 'Millennium', whose 'There was not much light in the world when we left' reworks Nissim Ezekiel's credo 'Enterprise' ('It started as a pilgrimage'), Nambisan, half a century later, seems to extend and interrogate, while doggedly continuing with, the curious business of Indian poetry in English itself. -Amit Chaudhuri

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Parvathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry after a very long time. This one’s dark. It’s also funny in parts, in an ironical way. Liked it.