A Name for Every Leaf (Selected Poems, 1959-2015)

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The best critics, like the best poets, are shamans. They are capable of leading readers into the inner life of a text to that dark cavern where its heart pumps and its life blood flows.

While I don't claim to be able to perform that role, and less so when I am reading poetry in translation, I admit I am curious about the heart centre of a book. What fuels the enterprise? Can we feel its pulse? I am curious also about my fellow-poets. What draws them to this stubbornly riddling, twilight language? What do they need to express here that they cannot articulate in the more accessible, daytime tongue of prose?

And so, as a reader, I find myself looking for a line or phrase that unlocks what seems to be the deepest impetus behind the enterprise - the motive behind the crime, as it were. On reading this volume of new and selected poems by Ashok Vajpeyi, I chanced upon two lines that distilled a recurrent preoccupation: 'As long as you still have words, you can't reach Brahma's forest,' says the poet. But he is quick to add, and not without some wryness, "This too, we learned through words.

In one swift stroke you have the paradox central to language - its power and its inadequacy, its capacity to lead us to places of liminality, as well as its inability to penetrate the darkest thickets of human consciousness. In tones that veer from the rueful to the contemplative, the celebratory to the wistful (but seldom despairing), Vajpeyi returns to this theme time and again across his poems.

Poetry with its language of obliquity and shadow is perhaps the only verbal route to at least the outskirts of Brahma's forest. For poetry is essentially a door. "We forget to close it on purpose' (as the poet says in his essay, The Door of Poetry'). Why? Perhaps because we know its business is to be an aperture. It is intended to stay open, to invite wonder and surprise, and to smuggle some of the enchantment from the darker realms into our prosaic, sunlit, everyday worlds.