Bird Songs

The late RK Laxman, perhaps India’s most beloved cartoonist of all time, loved crows and drew hundreds of sketches featuring them. According to him, the crow should be appointed India’s national bird, adding for good measure that he found peacocks rather ugly. His wife Kamala once joked during a newspaper interview that her husband loved crows more than he loved her. Laxman would have enjoyed Siddhartha Menon’s recently published poetry collection The Compass Bird, where there are a great many poems devoted to crows—not to mention pigeons, koels, kites, kingfishers, butterflies, squirrels et al (there’s a peacock poem, too, but we can look past this small concession to normativity). Like this excerpt, from the delightfully named ‘Crowpnishad’ (itself a unit of the eight-part poem ‘Corvus’), where Menon describes two kinds of crows as metaphors for introversion and extroversion, respectively.

“Two crows are on the highest twigs / of the gnarled wood-apple tree / beneath your window. / One is preoccupied with itself / twisting its grey neck / and picking constantly / while the other looks snappily around. // Would it be too much to fancy / that between them on a razor’s edge they span / the inner and the outer?”

Human-bird encounters are depicted with wit and tenderness. In the poem ‘Treepie’, we see the dynamic between the titular bird (“connoisseur of drawing attention/ without seeming to”) and a man who feeds her every day at a certain hour. “She has her bread / and you have her attention / fragile as an egg / for just as long as necessary / for something warm to incubate.” As the last two lines demonstrate so beautifully, ‘love’ is (among other things) a habit, a verb. And like any other habit, reinforcing patterns kick in once you’ve been doing it for a while, day after day, breadcrumb by breadcrumb.

Menon’s voice is both wise and wise-cracking—a poem called ‘Mynah’ begins with a straight-faced pun that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Reader’s Digest joke. “Despite its elevation / this mynah has never been a ‘Majah’” Here, ‘mynah’ and ‘majah’ are used as puns to suggest the words ‘minor’ and ‘major’, respectively. The word ‘elevation’ also has a double meaning—it can mean ‘promotion’ (ie the ‘minor’ being ‘elevated’ to a ‘major’ position) but here, the poet is also using it to suggest elevation in the literal sense, which is the flight of the mynah. Elsewhere, a group of peahens “hang out together / like matrons on an outing”. These witticisms aren’t just decorative, however. They’re how Menon reels you in, and later when he has your undivided attention, he increases the emotional stakes strategically.

A great example of this manoeuvre is the eight-page allegorical poem ‘Bird Song’, written “for birds and birders of every tongue, with admiration”. This is Menon using his bird-framework to mount a wide-ranging allegory. ‘Bird Song’ is structured as the story of all birdkind temporarily uniting to “build a mighty edifice/ on a scale never before conceived”. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells you important truths about the way human beings can generate discord out of nothing, seemingly. In the same way, ‘Bird Song’ can be read as a euphemistic dissection of the challenges before any democracy—since all bird-species fancy themselves master builders, they must agree upon a group of designated builders for the planned edifice. Then, of course. there’s the question of labour rights, shift-planning and so on.

One of my go-to comfort reads is the collected works of James Herriot, the British veterinary surgeon whose stories about his practice made him a bestselling author worldwide. Menon’s poems go a step further than Herriot’s feel-good, empathy-first stories. The compassion and the tenderness in these verses are used to gently nudge the reader into interrogating their relationship with nature, with the birds and animals that coexist with them daily. This is in line with his previous books like The Owl and The Laughing Buddha (2016), where the titular poem described an owl figurine and a ‘laughing Buddha’ statuette being used as paperweights — two eccentric icons of ‘wisdom’. This method has been refined, sharpened to a point with The Compass Bird, and this book represents Menon working at peak prowess.

And if you’re looking to introspect on your own relationship with nature, you could turn to haikus. No other poetic form is as closely associated with nature, no other form as well-equipped for the task at hand. In the introduction to the recently released Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India (edited by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Rimi Nath), the British critic Chris Baldick’s definition is cited: “a form of Japanese lyric verse that encapsulates a single impression of a natural object or scene, within a particular season—written in seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables”. ‘Kigo’, in fact, refers to the word used within traditional Japanese haiku as a seasonal reference—direct references as well as oblique ones such as using ‘frog’ to denote winter or ‘butterfly’ to denote spring.

Late-Blooming Cherries does a fine job of bringing together haiku verses that occupy the entirety of the emotional spectrum — there are poems that speak of nostalgia and wistfulness and pain, as you would expect from a haiku anthology. But there are also poems covering very different ground, emotionally speaking. Poems about hopes and dreams, the absurdity of the human condition, the ever-diminishing window of freedom available to us in late-stage capitalism. In total, there are 50-odd poets here and as Nongkynrih notes in his introduction, only 11 of these are well-known for their work outside of haiku.

Abhay K’s verses resemble the traditionalist school of haiku associated with Japanese masters like Basho: “A boa clings tightly / to a tree twig — / forest fire // five egrets / flying home— / darkening sky // admiring / its own reflection— / a heron at Mare Masai // stretching its arms / in prayer— / a traveller’s palm” Arvinder Kaur’s lines are feats of extreme compression, wherein a well-chosen image or two unpacks a dense narrative about the mechanics of grief. “house sale / the last trip / to mama’s kitchen // psychiatry clinic / the entire staff / in blue // funeral day / grandpa’s chessmen / back in the box”

Some of my personal favourite lines in this book came from Shashi Angelee Deodhar (1947-2018), a Chandigarh-based ophthalmologist and poet who became known for her haiku. Deodhar co-edited two previous volumes: Indian Haiku: A Bilingual Anthology of Haiku By 105 Poets from India (2008) and Journeys: An Anthology of International Haibun (2015). Her verses in Late-Blooming Cherries are proof of her effortless felicity with haiku. The first line begins in a ‘zendo’ or a Japanese meditation hall, and the poem soon embarks on some startling imagery to paint a vivid picture.

“in the silence / of the zendo / my stomach growls // between us / vapours from the teacups / autumn chill // midnight walk / the dog nudges me down / our moonlit path // out of the fog / a crow’s cracked caw / drips into silence //”

These lines display the qualities Nongkynrih calls the most fundamental elements of good haiku in the introduction: brevity, economy, concision and simplicity. And as the introduction also clarifies, ‘show, don’t tell’ is a big part of the architecture of a good haiku. As a creator of haiku verses you cannot spell out the ‘point’ in so many words, like a newspaper article. It is considered the reader’s job to ‘discover’ why a certain metaphor or a particular image works as well as it does. To that end, the editors mention that they rejected entries that sought to “poeticize and philosophize its subject”. The book’s name has been derived from Nongkynrih’s own entry here, a poem that begins with the lines: “late-blooming cherries / by the highway—how else can I / describe my haiku?” These are lines that are at once transparent and deeply enigmatic, dynamic and yet imbued with the stillness that great poetry is blessed with. At its best, Late-Blooming Cherries embraces these contradictions and spins gold out of them.

Late-Blooming Cherries and The Compass Bird deploy nature metaphors in service of very different prosodies and diverging philosophical aims. What they share is a certain holistic vision of humanity, one where our consciousness is indubitably expanded when we stop, slow down and take a moment to ponder upon our natural surroundings. A slow and deliberate savouring of these volumes is, therefore, recommended.

birdbooksKynpham Sing NongkynrihLate-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from IndiaNatureRimi NathSiddhartha MenonThe Compass Bird