still it rains
On the lake as placid as your face in tears
And on the hills as stubborn as your breast
But the rocks melt in pity with the waters
They cascade down to fellowwaters to rest
So were we together in rain and sun
Dreaming a long, long togetherness
In dreams we were to be together here
Each dreaming differently a shared past
Pressed for eternity on paper
It was not to be
The phoenix burns its body into sunset all night long
By daybreak it is no longer bird nor fire, only song"
RATING:/
Hoshang Merchant is perhaps one of the first Indian poets to write in English, turning the forms on their head and breathing new life into them in a brand new postcolonial nation.
His poetry is a living creature, a fascinating chimaera, formed of bits and bobs from here and there, Different cultures and languages, customs and traditions, meet in his innovative verses, which are steeped in postmodernism, Rarely does he restrict himself in his poetry where ideas meet and clash, It is a vibrant version of cosmopolitanism, all the colours shining through instead of stilted visions in black and white, He can talk of Agha Shahid Ali and Ezra Pound
with equal ease, jump from Anaïs Nin to Rumi with dexterity.
While his roots maybe Indian, his poetry is truly of the world, capable of making a snug, comfortable home for itself in any corner of the earth.
While this collection only provides a small glimpse into his really magnificent oeuvre, it is enough to display his stunning control over language, overturns of phrase and wild metaphors.
Each poem is a careful balancing act of the highest order between ideas and their successful execution, not a single word wasted.
Merchant is equally adept at calmly subduing his readership and shocking them into attention, The human body, and its attendant desires and sources of pleasure, occupy a central position in his poetry, A queer person himself, Merchant knows too well about love and longing, about loss and leaving, The gay Indian experience, as Ali calls it, is documented frequently, He, love's fool, is outspoken and unapologetic, Too long he has been read too less, And that needs to change soon,
In Kazim Ali's words from the Introduction to this edition: "In the end, Hoshang belongs to everyone, He belongs to no one, He is himself. Which, for a poet, is an achievement of the most profound and unspeakable kind, These poemsthe work of a lifetimemust themselves pronounce that sentence of praise, " And once you start reading this breathtaking and wondrous collection, you will see that pronouncement coming true, Everyone tumbles through these pages: parent and prostitute, lover and charlatan, Jew and Turk, madman and saint, fornicator and abstainer, the geisha and the devdasi as well as the Mumbai starlet.
Heres Gods plenty. Devoured by a voracious appetite, spewed out as poems by a compulsive energy,
This is modernism with its pants down, uncle Ezra lending arse at Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay this is Bombay pretending to be Paris, paanstained and all.
This is convent English giving Mumbai Marathi a welldeserved kick in the pants this is the Parsi Queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet.
My Sunset Marriage represents the life of Hoshang Merchant told through the best poetry he has written over forty years, selected and introduced by the poet Kazim Ali.
Hoshang Merchant b,has authored twentynine books of poetry, literary commentary, translations, memoirs, and anthologies including Yaraana: Gay Writing from Indiaand most recently Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant.
In the mids, Hoshang made Hyderabad home and taught generations of students at the English Department of University of Hyderabad till he retired in.
Kazim Alis many books include poetry, essay, fiction and translation, His most recent book of poetry is All Ones Blue: New and Selected Poems HarperCollins India, He is a professor of creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin College, Ohio, .