50 Poems from Auroville

This is a thoughtful compilation. There is the quiet lyricism of Marta Guha’s The Indian Shawl:

Now darkness falls like rain

And the hands of shadow

Throw over the shoulders

Of even the poorest

A shawl studded with stars

Or the plangent simplicity of Gordon Kostange’s The News and of Meenakshi’s Thousandsof Kingdoms:

Thousands of kingdoms

Within my body,

Thousands of ages

Within my living cells -

Am I a tiny bubble

Captured in TAMIL casket?

And the vigor of Celestine’s I am an active, Living Dynamo:

I am active, Living Dynamo

If you truly make One step toward me,

I will leap Nine steps to grab you,

Stir you up…

There are many good poems here which can be enjoyed in their own right. But, given the title, one inevitably wants to know how far these poems evoke the experience of living in Auroville.

The ‘Auroville experience’ is, of course, elusive and highly subjective, but in this context it is interesting to compare this collection with the previous collection of Auroville poetry, Dust and Dreams. This slim anthology was published in 1985 and represents, as the editors described it, “a sampling of the ideas, aspirations, and expressions of the members of this international community.”

Unlike Vikas’s new anthology, Dust and Dreams was clearly for internal consumption. There is no attempt to give a gloss to the presentation, and the poetry and prose of the twelve contributors is in their native languages.

Yet, in the former compilation, something of the authentic Auroville note can be heard time and time again in the sonorous or raw intensity of expression, aspiration:

Auroville is a prayer and a curse

A suspicious sidelong glance

An explosion of silent love…

– Roger

Je souffre d’absence

je souffre de présence à demie

j’ai mal de ne pas être vous

– Monique

In comparison, many of the poems in 50 Poems from Auroville are more ‘finished’, more ‘poetic’. In some ways, this makes them less evocative, perhaps, of the ‘dust’ of Auroville and the struggle to transmute the raw ore into the gold of a new world.

This shouldn’t be overstated. That indefinable note can be heard at times in the new collection, for example, in Kevin Myers’ Where is the Straight and Narrow Path?:

The sun has sunk a ray

Inside my flesh

And trapped by bone and skin

It roars in deep frustration

Or in Anu’s Transfer 2:

Here is the deep ground

The level land

Where the heart burns

Like a crater at dawn

Through the quiet

ache of the hours.

No doubt, as Vikas explains himself, the contrast between the ‘feel’ of the two collections reflects his sensibility and preferences in poetry. It may also reflect the fact that, unlike the contributors to the previous anthology, not all of the poets in 50 Poems have actually lived in Auroville.

While some of the poems in 50 Poems date from the same period as Dust and Dreams, others are more recent. So a further possibility is that the contrast between the poetry in the two collections actually reflects a certain shift within Auroville itself: from the somewhat anarchic, free flow expressionism of the 1970s and 1980s to the more ordered discourse of today.

This is not a judgment. Both periods provided their share of good poetry, as this compilation proves. But if there is some truth in this perception, it demonstrates how sensitive poets are to subtle changes in the community’s energy field.

Vikas has done a great job in putting together this compilation. Let us hope that we don’t have to wait another thirty years for the next dip into Auroville’s poetic culture.

50 Poems from Auroville. An Anthology compiled by Vikas Vickers. Auroville Press, 2017. 

Available soon from Auroville bookshops and from auroville.com

Price: Rs 450.