Where the mind is without rein
Special Arrangement
The Coloured Yolk of Love: Vrindavan Poems, Gopalakrishnan Kottoor.
Kottoor's latest poetry collection treads the path of Jayadeva.
“Drops of rain/play upon me/the stops of your flute…”
Moonlit
night and it is raas-leela in the secret groves of Vrindavan. There’s a
new bard at hand, watching and recording. Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s latest
poetry collection treads the path of Jayadeva’s Geeta Govindam, the ashtapati.
Lush nature, sly mischief, pouting plaints, deep yearning and the
movement towards fulfilment/realisation are the landmarks on this path.
Kottoor becomes Radha, a gopi, a comforting observer, and provides conciliatory replies from Krishna himself.
Weight of sorrow
Radha complains, she imagines how her lover spends time away from her, but she also understands: “No need to be/the breaking tendril/of an apology,/You know that’ll break me”.
You
feel the weight of sorrow, but also acceptance; the lover is, after
all, ultimately hers, they're never really apart; indeed, they’re one.
Moreover, deep down she realises he’s the matrix of all life.
Kottoor gives us a ring-side view. Only a poet who’s imbibed the magic of those moonlit nights, read the ashtapati and then lived it, can deliver such brimming lines.
“Red,
red, my coral seeds/break bleeding around you;/White, white, my
windflowers/waft desolate within you;/Chained to your feathers/in every
Vrindavan weather,/my lips wet purple/frosting your name…”
There’s
physicality conveyed by colour and metaphor. Once we’ve entered this
milieu, the poet’s job is half-done. His dramatic empathy completes the
picture.
A life well lived states a happy union
between body, mind and higher consciousness; the poetic dialogues
between Radha-Krishna and their gopi friends are an epitome of this
union. Minstrels and saints have attempted to preserve these moonlit
dialogues in song. The poet becomes voyeur, participant, omniscient
narrator, and the scale runs from grossly physical to highly
philosophical to supremely spiritual, each stop on the magic flute
evoking more than these bare descriptions suggest.
If
you can dare to classify poetry, this could be one way of doing it:
staccato, sensitive or sensual. Rapid-fire, isolated words dropped like
rocks, suggesting, stuttering, throbbing, often hurting. “…as upon your knees/with a kiss/on my feet/you touch/the tip/of my/bleeding thorn”; or lines like the skin of a river resonating at the delicate hint of a breeze, conveying quietly, evoking subtly: “We touched each other/after so long,/as though for the first time./Caress curled inside of us/a note trembling on your flute…”
Or then the red-blooded, full-lipped, passionate embrace of the erotic,
the voluptuous, where you feel the heated breath of words, shiver at
the touch of their fingertips. “I don’t care if anybody sees me
now.../I take you kissing me in my arms/and hug you from the rain;/Keep
your body of sapphire/where you hurt me the most;/Let my breasts
burst/for you/to sandal fires…”
Kottoor spreads a
canvas that calls for all three kinds. The emotions we see here are
quicksilver and mutative even as we watch; their vast grandeur can
change into the tickle of a little finger, the shade of a not-yet smile.
“Is Love just the body, beloved?/Is your love
just my body Krishna?/Or is it Radha, formless lightning?.../Is love
soul,/bereft of the thirsts of longing,/or our bodies entwined/ in the
night ooze of the senses,/among dipp’d blue lotuses?”
Problem of plenty
There
is, however, a problem of plenty. Getting 214 poems into a book
requires care; each poem is, after all, a concentrate the mind has to
dissolve before consumption. A couple of unwieldy poems showcasing a
small living core, some repetitive scenarios (though the poet is
probably scanning for nuances within similar moments) and the occasional
absence of an editor’s touch are the result.
On the
whole, the volume is passport to a legendary love, to a place and time
that sparkle with mysticism and mischief, where the body is expressive
and free and the mind without rein, where everything on earth represents
something in heaven.
“Love must be/poetry,” sings Radha, “until we leave/each other’s senses.”
The Coloured Yolk of Love: Vrindavan Poems; Gopikrishnan Kottoor, Authorspress Rs. 295.
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