Book Review: 'Book of Verse' by Ruskin Bond
Penguin Books India P Ltd
11, Community Centre
Panchsheel Park
New Delhi-110 017
Rs.160/-
Reviewed by Prema Nandakumar
There has always been a poetic elegance in Ruskin Bond’s fiction which he has been blending in choice flavours for nearly six decades. It is then natural that here is also some of the humdrum conversationalese of prose fiction in his poetry. For the first time he has chosen the medium of verse for publication. Why so? He says the poet was always in him when he had wished to become a writer, “but having to make a living from the written world, he became a writer chiefly of prose, for as we all know, you can’t make a living writing poetry.”
Nature
Apparently an established can sell poetry. Ravi Singh knows his market well. Blest be the publishing industry! Else we would not have had this Panchatantram animalia and allow nature to be our teacher.
“Most lives run riot –
But the bud
opens silently.
And flower gives way
to fruit.
So must we search
For the stillness
Within the tree.
The silence within
the root.”
Certainly a lesson for us caught in this cacophonic world of human affairs. Bond has helpfully divided his poems under various headings like love and nature and we enjoy the vignettes with a smile. Tikkies and chat eaten on the sly; second-hand goods shop that has “tales of hundred failure/And ten hundred broken dreams”; granny climbing a tree; and if we thank the Lord for having given us mangoes and fishes to eat, it falls within reason for a bedbug to express gratitude to the Creator for providing it with luscious human things, “those nooks and crannies/Where the blood runs sweet.”
Charmed circle
The charmed circle of the Bond-narrative has held us in thrall all these years. The mountains generous with purring streams and crumbling buildings, forlorn cemeteries and eerie ghosts have become our companions.
The Book of Verse flings alike a net of charm. The pages are brief, sometimes an entry is just four lines, but the rasa flows into our heart – be that of a child, a youth, a middle-aged commuter or a toothless ancient, bent over his walking stick.
Bond is the universal writer who makes us relax and watch the lone fox dancing, a bat flying quite low, the firefly in the room, the hooting owl, the snail, the snake, kites, and tigers; oh, is so much of flora and fauna left on the Earth in spsite of man’s acquisitive nature and deadly pesticides? Good to know that you can still hug a deodar, blow a kiss to the cherry, and muse upon the tapping of an oak tree.
The verse cluster, “A Song or Lost Friends” has seven sections for the seven notes of music. An autobiographical fragment carrying the private tragedies of a very public World War, Bond’s aethesis leaves us waving silently:
“Goodbye, Goodbye!
Into the forest’s silence,
Outside the dark tunnel,
Out of the tunnel, out of the dark….”
Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, February 5, 2008 (Book Review)
Penguin Books India P Ltd
11, Community Centre
Panchsheel Park
New Delhi-110 017
Rs.160/-
Reviewed by Prema Nandakumar
There has always been a poetic elegance in Ruskin Bond’s fiction which he has been blending in choice flavours for nearly six decades. It is then natural that here is also some of the humdrum conversationalese of prose fiction in his poetry. For the first time he has chosen the medium of verse for publication. Why so? He says the poet was always in him when he had wished to become a writer, “but having to make a living from the written world, he became a writer chiefly of prose, for as we all know, you can’t make a living writing poetry.”
Nature
Apparently an established can sell poetry. Ravi Singh knows his market well. Blest be the publishing industry! Else we would not have had this Panchatantram animalia and allow nature to be our teacher.
“Most lives run riot –
But the bud
opens silently.
And flower gives way
to fruit.
So must we search
For the stillness
Within the tree.
The silence within
the root.”
Certainly a lesson for us caught in this cacophonic world of human affairs. Bond has helpfully divided his poems under various headings like love and nature and we enjoy the vignettes with a smile. Tikkies and chat eaten on the sly; second-hand goods shop that has “tales of hundred failure/And ten hundred broken dreams”; granny climbing a tree; and if we thank the Lord for having given us mangoes and fishes to eat, it falls within reason for a bedbug to express gratitude to the Creator for providing it with luscious human things, “those nooks and crannies/Where the blood runs sweet.”
Charmed circle
The charmed circle of the Bond-narrative has held us in thrall all these years. The mountains generous with purring streams and crumbling buildings, forlorn cemeteries and eerie ghosts have become our companions.
The Book of Verse flings alike a net of charm. The pages are brief, sometimes an entry is just four lines, but the rasa flows into our heart – be that of a child, a youth, a middle-aged commuter or a toothless ancient, bent over his walking stick.
Bond is the universal writer who makes us relax and watch the lone fox dancing, a bat flying quite low, the firefly in the room, the hooting owl, the snail, the snake, kites, and tigers; oh, is so much of flora and fauna left on the Earth in spsite of man’s acquisitive nature and deadly pesticides? Good to know that you can still hug a deodar, blow a kiss to the cherry, and muse upon the tapping of an oak tree.
The verse cluster, “A Song or Lost Friends” has seven sections for the seven notes of music. An autobiographical fragment carrying the private tragedies of a very public World War, Bond’s aethesis leaves us waving silently:
“Goodbye, Goodbye!
Into the forest’s silence,
Outside the dark tunnel,
Out of the tunnel, out of the dark….”
Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, February 5, 2008 (Book Review)
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