Lakdhas Wikkramasinha (Author), Aparna Halpé (Editor), Michael Ondaatje (Editor)

Despite his appearance in Michael Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family, few Canadians will be familiar with the work of Sri Lankan poet, Lakdhas Wikkramasinha. Thanks to editors Aparna Halpé and Michael Ondaatje we now have a substantial selection of his poetry. The poet’s early death by drowning stands out in his biography, and many of the poems’ preoccupation with death are understandable in light of his disturbing fate.

This collection is divided into three sections on history, politics, and family; and the first, “Camões: A History,” highlights the Portuguese colonization of Sri Lanka. Sandwiched between sonnets in “Memorial” and “Recipe for a Sinhalese Novel” are a wide variety of poetic forms. “Memorial” sets the historical scene of violence: “Let a few dead names suffice, for the sable dead.” Death’s darkness is featured in “sable” and in the carefully measured phrasing where caesuras pause to take stock of the fallen: “Shot in their compounds, in their funereal gardens.” The devastation of colonial history and civil war contrasts with Sri Lanka’s natural beauty, the few against a bounty: “Suddenly bereft of canna, and the odours of / Picca-mal; and the pullulating dust, wailed with sorrows.” This eulogy gathers pullulating dust, a soundstorm of exotic extinction, avalanching “For Singho Appu, Siman, Jiris and Punchi Nilame / For Ampe Romanis and the lady Sabarath Etana.” From these specifics, the weeping spreads in parallel lines without the earlier end stops: “For those shot on the banks of the Algoda River / For those who were flogged in the somnolence of the Keloni / For those driven and shot on the Wanawaha rail-track / That road the sovereign trains of cinnamon.”

These parallel lines stretch out on the horizon of rivers and railways to end the first stanza that spills over to the second: “Of tea, coffee and cinnamon, that are acrid memories / In the night death struck our folk down.” With its accumulated bodies and commodities, death is personified: “Death, at the hand of the Moor / And Sepoy had more candour than its aftermath.” Death picks up speed toward the end, registered in chaotic syntax: “Death, swiftly dealt / Had more reality that [sic] the indolence / And disorder of our villagers.” Like a plague, history becomes undone in a series of “un” prefixes: “divided and ruled / Were the scum and the Moor aboriginals / Unpunished the evil, and ourselves unheard; / The dead, in melody of jasmines, dead / In graves unknown.” Wikkramasinha’s fractured syntax imitates the tragic fates of Sri Lanka, while the flowing Sinhalese script delivers the jasmine melody.”Memorial” begins with a few dead names before expanding to a multitude of unknown graves, as the poet eulogizes and sets his sights on the overlooked.

”From the Twelfth Century” returns in history through two nestled stanzas shaped to convey the poetic process against time’s violence. The poem begins with parallel lines that gradually recede: “Because of the Kali era / because of the idea of a poem.” Poetry “from word to word” may offer some degree of salvation as we move to the second stanza: “Nailed to the cross, / possessed, / these are poems written / on a red, blue, and black robe.” Wikkramasinha’s formal patterns appear alongside his flowing Sinhalese script.

“Dandhabanavaka” is an ekphrastic poem based on a tenth-century bas-relief. Although it depicts an “Enclosed world,” it stretches out through several a’s in the title and a dominance of liquid l’s: enclosed, world, duplicity, long, female, glaring, lake, flutter, spiral, climbing. Opposed to these consonants are the enclosing r’s which capture the duplicity: world, drawn, red, hair, Over, glaring, carved, flutter, staircase, branches, ruched, spiral, Monstrous. These sounds shape the bas-relief surrealistically in “a ruched spiral” and “Monstrous climbing eye.” Whether through syntax or sound, the poet misshapes “disused time” and abused history.

Surreal shapes and colours recur in the next poem, “Camões: A History,” which appears in formal quatrains. Again the slightly awkward syntax works against Portuguese colonial history and formal stanzas:

“His name we would have now forgotten if

In 1550, he had not lost an eye

Which was one half of an open door

To poke the white and red — “

Camǒes’s convoluted metaphoric slide and colour scheme lead to the second stanza with its dashes, as the lines convey the motions and emotions of his voyage:

“When he was drawn across the waters,

Borne down the concupiscent waters —

A heart of albumen, and his mind a coping stone

To make lean metaphors of his repose —“

Painter-poet draws with watercolours to cope with fate: from burden and birth, from Wallace Stevens’s concupiscence, and from anatomy to architecture, the poet’s flowing metaphors rage. The coping stone connects anatomy to architecture, from his temples to “hairy genitals / Hung in Ceuta.” The Sri Lankan poet identifies with his Portuguese counterpart whose odyssey captured the sixteenth century — “Writing his own life / As the life of his country.” Camões’s coping stone can carry only so much of history’s burden: “The convict Camões / Redeemed by his style.”

The dramatic quality of many of these poems is almost Browningesque. “In the King’s Jail” returns to the eighteenth-century Pedru Gaskon in two quatrains:

“If I noosed at all, it was to try an elephant

If I shot it was at a Royal Swan

If I pleasured it was a Regal pleasure

And if I died, it was for an High Lady.”

The poet’s plans are organized in hypothetical parallels with the second stanza, which moves Gaskon:

“Now, for a lady I complete this third month,

Sleeping the nights alone — an animal;

And as the sparrow’s belly ripens with paddy milk

and the moon wanes, still darker days await me.”

So many of the lyrics end with darkness descending over the course of history. “Heavy with Love” is an erotic portrait from a woman’s point of view, captured in the splitting of syllables in “hon- / -ey” and “trem- // -bling.” Wikkramasinha effectively uses space within a line to convey themes. Thus, the beheading in “Antonio Barrettu” is portrayed in spaces within a line:

“Antonio Barrettu it was your head

Your head spiked in the bestial weather

Low as a caste and the gourd gypped

Guts become the sacked verdure”

Scattered onomatopoeia and spacing highlight Barrettu’s beheading.

These rugged lyrics of the first section, “Camões: A History,” continue in the second section, “Hand Bomb Et Cetera.” The first poem, “Don’t Talk to Me About Matisse,” varies the ekphrastic form by focusing less on painting and aesthetics than on the politics of colonialism. The postcolonial poet dismisses Matisse, Gauguin, and van Gogh for their exploitation of Indigenous subjects — “the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse.” Wikkramasinha paints his own portrait of painter-hunter “with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal/crucified by Gauguin,” who spreads paint, blood, and syphilis. He rejects European tradition “where the nude woman reclines forever / on a sheet of blood.” He displaces and replaces colonial models:

“Talk to me instead of the culture generally —

how the murderers were sustained

by the beauty robbed of savages; to our remote

villages the painters came, and our white-washed

mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.”

Post-Impressionist and Expressionist anthropologists painted and surveyed with blood, an offshoot of imperial expansion.

“The Poet” explores two kinds of violence: one against society, the other involving self-inflicted wounds. “He is the one that, tossing a bomb into / The crowd, takes notes.” The activist-poet is the one who “from an unseen distance / Levels on the tripod that black rifle / With sights that see as far as his soul.” A tripod holds a camera as well as a weapon for capturing images and enemies. The poet ambushes the reader through a series of repetitions strategically placed to imitate the action.

If Wikkramasinha is critical of Matisse, he is full of praise for Mandelshtam, a kindred spirit in suffering. “In the copper basin as you / bent your face.” He pictures his fellow poet smelling “ixora,” an unlikely flower in a Russian prison, but the basin contains the smell of soldiers. He shifts from the olfactory sense to the auditory: “Amidst / that uniform din nor hear / the death-chalked / Aonian song.” Like the ixora, the Aonian song struggles to grow in prison where the sounds end in locomotives and “soldiers in a fit, / going to the ‘front’ encased / in shit.” The poets’ reciprocal identities of incarceration work through small containers pitted against a larger system. “Your skull was an enormous park.” Aural expansion continues toward the end of the poem: “So the wild beginning of a night’s choir.” Among prisoners, the Aonian song has gone mad: “the choir begins — the music sounding us, // a last good-bye.”

Yet, it is not a last good-bye, since Mandelshtam resurfaces in “Poem with a Grimace”: “Mandelshtam, beaten to his knees / in prison.” Moreover, an echo of “peacock scream” appears in both poems, a sound that afflicts both poets. The poem’s grimace covers not just mood, but it is also characterized by masked syntax in surreal blur. “Today, I must thank you, / wherever you are I know.” That certainty of knowledge is quantified by an uncertain location, and locution of “black sand’s clogged your throat.” The voice’s grimace is immediately followed by its visual equivalent in a constrictive insect: “Look at the sugar-ant — / a terrifying grimace on its face, / wringing its feet, feeding on my memory: all / that I have of you.” Metric feet accompany the stumbling insect. The asphyxia of a Gregor Samsa is captured in the long e sounds and repetition from the end of the first stanza to the second — “All that I have of you —.” Which is “a picture: three sisters, a father & your dead mother.” In this grimaced picture “they must / wear their fine masks of derision, / twisted with lies.” The poet’s twisted imagery is the hallmark of his style and symbolism, with the addition of ampersands alongside the swirl of Sinhalese.

The twisted grimace takes different forms in the rest of the poem in surrealistic shaping of syntax and simile where sugar-ant, woodpecker, peacock, bats, elephant, monkey, and leeches enter landscape and mindscape. A tension between body parts and kingdom of animals shapes “the time-shaped / purest flash under your dress / once held in my hands, jabbed at / like a woodpecker.” The poet is under duress as he speaks of “your splashing arms, of the dead / man who wrote.” The lushness of nature is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s colours: “the green / columnar plantain trees, / of bunches of golden plantains.” The poet tropes tentatively “of the trembling / finger-like leaves / before your window.” A parenthesis further contorts the rococo grimace and Sinhalese swirl:

“(there were too, two

calamander chairs, a plant-pot & two

dusty hands, with candlesticks

before the piano — your mother’s).”

The hardwood calamander and beating “two” pick up the woodpecker’s jabs. Although “before your window” and “before the piano” are spatial markers, they also jab at temporal antecedents of “impossibly antique features,” “inheritance,” and “feeding on my memory.” Wikkramasinha’s rhythms proceed through hard columnar plantain trees, calamander chairs, and against purest flesh, splashing arms, and finger-like leaves.

The grimace also emerges from two chairs and two dusty hands to three book-racks that invoke torture, just as the old murals crumbling to dust return to dusty hands, and remote temples return to Camões’s temples where “his fingers tapped the skin of time.” Accompanied by peacock scream and “screeching concert” of bats, the wars “still go on.”

For Canadian readers Wikkramasinha’s troubled waters seem more familiar in the light of A.M. Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet As Landscape” — with Lycidas, “and in his secret shines / Like phosphorus. At the bottom of the sea.” Running in the family of poets, Wikkramasinha waits “for the dead train to come / Silently to a stop, silently to a stop — “.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Poets; Bilingual edition (July 25 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681377349
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681377346

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.