Shahr-e Jaanaan: City of the Beloved
Poems by Adeeba Shahid Talukder
Tupelo Press, https://www.tupelopress.org/
|
North Adams, MA:
|
Talukder calls forth that tradition, not only via lavish imagery, but overtly, in a selection of poems that harken to Majnun Layla. This time-honored, tragic love story of Qays the poet (Majnun) and Layla—lovers kept apart by Layla’s forced marriage to another—was famously rendered in as a narrative poem by Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209). Talukder takes the story and cleaves it into fragments, like gemstones hewn from an uncut crystal.
Here, in her poem, “the branch,” she conveys Majnun’s heartbreak, borrowing symbolism from the story, in which Majnun is a nightingale on a branch and Layla is a rose in the garden. The poem further trades on a key plot element: Majnun, wandering the desert mad with grief after losing Layla, tore his feet and ripped his shirt collar, then came upon a town where children were sent to stone him.
Majnoon, his collar sewn,
returns to the city.
He scatters the petals of roses…
In the courtyard, a child eats dust.
Layla gets her due as well, suffering the guilt of having driven Majnun insane with unrequited love in “for Majnoon.” Talukder again borrows the symbolism of Majnun the nightingale and Layla the rose, to express how Layla hurts herself in the way Majnun was hurt, as a kind of penance.
Does the nightingale not see
the bleeding rose, and how she tears
her collar, her very flesh?
He is mad, she pleads. He is mad.
I am to blame: It was I
who stole his senses.
Stone me…
For all the reverence she shows to tradition, Talukder is decidedly not a poet mired in the past. Majnun Layla, she reminds us, is also the subject of Hindi film. Another couple of legend, Farhad the Mountain Carver and Shireen, hurtle toward modernity when Shireen, in her plainest voice tells Farhad, “I own you.” Likewise, Kathak, a form of Indian classical dance, finds iteration in plain, words and Indian films. Into a style that nods to orthodox tropes, where pearls, silks, and moonlight are fully expected, Talukder transplants the murder of Benazir Bhutto amid ugly, burning contemporary waste—“tires, cars, banks, petrol pumps.”
Indeed, Talukder’s poems of the intimate present turn out to be the best of a very fine selection. Talukder moves the reader to a bittersweet and beautiful place whenever her mother appears in a poem. Mother fears for daughter, won’t let her leave the house when daughter dresses for seduction, pushing “bangles on bangles/onto my wrist, rubbing/my hands raw with metal/and glass.” The presence of Talukder’s mother in a poem lends complexity and music, evokes a shielding love under which the poet both chafes and flourishes. The voice of her mother is also the voice that goads so many modern women who hail from cultures that venerate marriage and children, warning her American daughter in late-learned English, “You’re getting older, and there are such few boys.” Talukder’s love of poetic traditions meets its shadow side: the way those traditions limit women’s lives.
In her preface to the book, Talukder pays homage to many poets and to the ghazal form that originated in 7th century Arabic poetry. The ghazal is a verse form composed of couplets, with a refrain repeated in each couplet. typically devoted to loss and love. (Poetry Foundation 2020) Ghazals have a metaphysical cast, so that human experience points also the divine, the mystical, and the sheer majesty of the cosmos. (Goodyear and Raza 2008, 113–114) To my ear, ghazals also invoke some dread through the inexorable rhythm of the couplets and refrains. Talukder mentions the influence of Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), the great crafter of ghazals in English. Although Talukder never writes a full-fledged ghazal in the vein of Ali, she does capture its merciless, sometimes sinister drone, to very fine effect in poems like “Beloved.”
God, I see your gray
cloak in the water.
your head,
upon the stones,
the red clay
flowing in you
like blood, like tears.
A small subset of poems in Shahr-e-Jaanaan fail to achieve the high bar Talukder sets with most of her work. These are confessional or narrative poems that tell a familiar tale of New York urban life: the lecherous, better-known writer with a quid pro quo (“Mumtaz Sahib of the Rounded Glasses”), depression in the metropolis (“If It Were”), and the cries of a toddler in a Manhattan Park (“the sky is moving, the sky is moving”). Talukder is a lyric poet who is at her best when willing to voice a big point with sonorous cultural and mystical echoes. Her music seems to disappear in the flat acoustics of standard, present-day narratives.
These few lesser poems aside, the great majority of individual poems in Shahr-e-Jaanaan are very fine. The book as a whole falters, however, in its heroic effort to unify the poems under an 8-part rubric of themes from the Urdu-Persian-Arabic canon—to “recreate” as the frontpiece states, “the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition.”
Talukder groups poems into sections with names such as “The Wine Cup” and “The Water of Life”; the book’s title work, “Shahr-e-Jaanaan: City of the Beloved,” a long poem broken into parts, also gets a section. This valiant concept is perhaps an homage to the narrative epic of Nizami Ganjavi or to the carefully curated book of ghazals, Diwan-e-Ghalib, by Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). Talukder deserves praise for the attempt to bring a larger order to her work, but the aim may simply be too lofty for the poems Talukder, who is still young in her craft, has completed to date. Section names often seem incongruent with the poems grouped within. Poem titles and forms are wildly dissimilar: titles range from all lower case to various modes of title capitalization; poem structure, line length, and line spacings are equally diverse. One result is a book with an unfinished quality overall, as if it were awaiting changes that would fit the poems more systematically into each theme. Another result is the unintended question, which came to me and another reader at the outset, of whether the book is a translation, which it is not.
Talukder might have done greater justice to each of her poems by avoiding the sectional groups and letting each poem stand on its own high merits. Quite simply, the poems in this volume are supple and luxurious, and every poem touches the core of grief, loss, exuberance, lust, or tender care. This is a poet, and a collection, to take to heart.
****
Works Cited:
Poetry Foundation. Glossary of poetic terms: ghazal.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal.
Accessed May 18, 2010.
Goodyear, Sara Suleri and Azra Raza. “Ghalib and the Art of the Ghazal.” Transition, no.99, 2008, pp.112-125.
Here, in her poem, “the branch,” she conveys Majnun’s heartbreak, borrowing symbolism from the story, in which Majnun is a nightingale on a branch and Layla is a rose in the garden. The poem further trades on a key plot element: Majnun, wandering the desert mad with grief after losing Layla, tore his feet and ripped his shirt collar, then came upon a town where children were sent to stone him.
Majnoon, his collar sewn,
returns to the city.
He scatters the petals of roses…
In the courtyard, a child eats dust.
Layla gets her due as well, suffering the guilt of having driven Majnun insane with unrequited love in “for Majnoon.” Talukder again borrows the symbolism of Majnun the nightingale and Layla the rose, to express how Layla hurts herself in the way Majnun was hurt, as a kind of penance.
Does the nightingale not see
the bleeding rose, and how she tears
her collar, her very flesh?
He is mad, she pleads. He is mad.
I am to blame: It was I
who stole his senses.
Stone me…
For all the reverence she shows to tradition, Talukder is decidedly not a poet mired in the past. Majnun Layla, she reminds us, is also the subject of Hindi film. Another couple of legend, Farhad the Mountain Carver and Shireen, hurtle toward modernity when Shireen, in her plainest voice tells Farhad, “I own you.” Likewise, Kathak, a form of Indian classical dance, finds iteration in plain, words and Indian films. Into a style that nods to orthodox tropes, where pearls, silks, and moonlight are fully expected, Talukder transplants the murder of Benazir Bhutto amid ugly, burning contemporary waste—“tires, cars, banks, petrol pumps.”
Indeed, Talukder’s poems of the intimate present turn out to be the best of a very fine selection. Talukder moves the reader to a bittersweet and beautiful place whenever her mother appears in a poem. Mother fears for daughter, won’t let her leave the house when daughter dresses for seduction, pushing “bangles on bangles/onto my wrist, rubbing/my hands raw with metal/and glass.” The presence of Talukder’s mother in a poem lends complexity and music, evokes a shielding love under which the poet both chafes and flourishes. The voice of her mother is also the voice that goads so many modern women who hail from cultures that venerate marriage and children, warning her American daughter in late-learned English, “You’re getting older, and there are such few boys.” Talukder’s love of poetic traditions meets its shadow side: the way those traditions limit women’s lives.
In her preface to the book, Talukder pays homage to many poets and to the ghazal form that originated in 7th century Arabic poetry. The ghazal is a verse form composed of couplets, with a refrain repeated in each couplet. typically devoted to loss and love. (Poetry Foundation 2020) Ghazals have a metaphysical cast, so that human experience points also the divine, the mystical, and the sheer majesty of the cosmos. (Goodyear and Raza 2008, 113–114) To my ear, ghazals also invoke some dread through the inexorable rhythm of the couplets and refrains. Talukder mentions the influence of Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), the great crafter of ghazals in English. Although Talukder never writes a full-fledged ghazal in the vein of Ali, she does capture its merciless, sometimes sinister drone, to very fine effect in poems like “Beloved.”
God, I see your gray
cloak in the water.
your head,
upon the stones,
the red clay
flowing in you
like blood, like tears.
A small subset of poems in Shahr-e-Jaanaan fail to achieve the high bar Talukder sets with most of her work. These are confessional or narrative poems that tell a familiar tale of New York urban life: the lecherous, better-known writer with a quid pro quo (“Mumtaz Sahib of the Rounded Glasses”), depression in the metropolis (“If It Were”), and the cries of a toddler in a Manhattan Park (“the sky is moving, the sky is moving”). Talukder is a lyric poet who is at her best when willing to voice a big point with sonorous cultural and mystical echoes. Her music seems to disappear in the flat acoustics of standard, present-day narratives.
These few lesser poems aside, the great majority of individual poems in Shahr-e-Jaanaan are very fine. The book as a whole falters, however, in its heroic effort to unify the poems under an 8-part rubric of themes from the Urdu-Persian-Arabic canon—to “recreate” as the frontpiece states, “the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition.”
Talukder groups poems into sections with names such as “The Wine Cup” and “The Water of Life”; the book’s title work, “Shahr-e-Jaanaan: City of the Beloved,” a long poem broken into parts, also gets a section. This valiant concept is perhaps an homage to the narrative epic of Nizami Ganjavi or to the carefully curated book of ghazals, Diwan-e-Ghalib, by Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). Talukder deserves praise for the attempt to bring a larger order to her work, but the aim may simply be too lofty for the poems Talukder, who is still young in her craft, has completed to date. Section names often seem incongruent with the poems grouped within. Poem titles and forms are wildly dissimilar: titles range from all lower case to various modes of title capitalization; poem structure, line length, and line spacings are equally diverse. One result is a book with an unfinished quality overall, as if it were awaiting changes that would fit the poems more systematically into each theme. Another result is the unintended question, which came to me and another reader at the outset, of whether the book is a translation, which it is not.
Talukder might have done greater justice to each of her poems by avoiding the sectional groups and letting each poem stand on its own high merits. Quite simply, the poems in this volume are supple and luxurious, and every poem touches the core of grief, loss, exuberance, lust, or tender care. This is a poet, and a collection, to take to heart.
****
Works Cited:
Poetry Foundation. Glossary of poetic terms: ghazal.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal.
Accessed May 18, 2010.
Goodyear, Sara Suleri and Azra Raza. “Ghalib and the Art of the Ghazal.” Transition, no.99, 2008, pp.112-125.