50 More Poems from Auroville

Book reviewBy Alan

Keywords: New publications, Poetry, Books, Anthologies and Matrimandir

Some years ago, Vikas (Alan Vickers), one of the pioneer Aurovilians, brought out a slim anthology of Auroville poetry called 50 poems from Auroville. He has now compiled a second collection, the proceeds of which, as before, will go towards land purchase in Auroville.

Auroville, as Vikas notes in his introduction, is “more than a place”. It is “an inner search for truth and beauty and for its manifestation in the world in a truly new consciousness.” Consequently, some of the poets featured here have never lived in Auroville, or even been associated with it.

Yet all of them in one way or another evoke something of the essence of the experience. It is in the poetry of matter as in Anandi’s hymn to Matrimandir

Grey perfume stains our hands

A strong sweetness,

The future grows,

And in a dovetailing of suns

A ray is caught

in shedding the old while seeking the new, as in Valentina Claeys’s

I have been asked to write myself into a wordless leaf

expanding to the New; no more than that

in Meenakshi’s dance of nature:

The morning sun

Picked the star flowers

And threw them

Into the moon-basket

in Alan’s sadhanic sifting:

the tangled and the mangled

condense,

falling, ever softly falling,

to bedrock

and, above all, in images of self-discovery and transformation, as in Vikas’s river meditation

Apart from the business of man

In this moment, everything just is

and Shraddhavan’s epiphany in the Matrimandir:

Nowhere you can escape

The crash and clash

Of the universe wheeling onward.

But to learn to hear –

Open your ears,

Open your heart –

Be aware

Everywhere

Always

Of My all-embracing silence

Forever inviolable…

Vikas has done a fine, devoted work in stringing together this little necklace of poetic gems.


50 More Poems from Auroville. Published by Prisma, December, 2019. Available from auroville.com: Rs 350. The previous compilation, 50 Poems from Auroville, is also available from the same website: Rs 320