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Jayanta Mahapatra. Bare Face Kottayam, Kerala, India. DC Books 2000. 79 pages. ISBN 81-264-0253-9
THE FRONT COVER and frontispiece feature a photo of some lovely 4,000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the title declares this is "Bare Face." Indeed, a bespectacled face peers clear-eyed at us with pursed, half-smiling lips and tilted head on the back cover. But between the covers even a first-time reader would immediately realize that this book of poetry (the author's thirteenth) is neither bare of verbal devices nor utterly devious, "a bare-faced lie." For at least the past decade (of the three since his first book, published at age forty-two) Jayanta Mahapatra has been working progressively away from an initially obscurantist, love-and-- weariness-haunted style of complaint that soon become more concerned to catch evanescent moods and apparently aimless meditations on quotidian events (characteristically rain, birds and skies, rivers and boats) and has attained in his last few books an increasingly sure and direct, almost investigative, poetic procedure. At the same time, as many poems in the first section here make clear, the poet has no faith in poetry. He has come to understand his craft as affording neither him nor his readers any reliable comforts, consolations, truths, or even momentary insights.
Poetry here certainly is not thought to be of any help in dealing with social issues, yet several poems more than touch on the problems of poverty, political betrayals, the indifference of the privileged. More emphatically, the second section of Bare Face presents a twenty-poem "Requiem" - both for Mahatma Gandhi and for his "discarded ideals." The last poem begins: "What you have left behind are / faded pictures on bare office walls. A day / every year as a national holiday." But, as generally in requiems, these losses are modified, though not moderated or transcended, by recognizing both unspecifiable futures and possible pasts. As poem 5 of "Requiem" notes, "Today, where history is, / it is as if the events were never real." This poem seeks to correct, or at least respond to, that obvious...