In his newest collection of poetry, Raymond Ramcharitar's voice comes perilously–or profitably–close to resembling that of a bodhisattva's, ie, an enlightened being who abstains from the pleasures of heaven in the interests of bestowing clarity on his fellow men.Whether you know the term from Buddhist lore or from a Steely Dan song, the intentions are similar: these poems are crucibles and clever anagrams of revelation, lingering amongst lesser collections and showing up the comparative poverty of their ambitions.
Ramcharitar is a poet, playwright and T&T Guardian columnist, whose previous works include a short fiction collection, The Island Quintet (2009), which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 2010. His earlier book of poetry, American Fall, was released in 2007. Both titles, like Here, were published by Peepal Tree Press. In December 2012, theTrinidad Theatre Workshop presented a script reading of Ramcharitar's award-winning play Paradiso.His new book Here's five sections could each be considered miniature collections, at least in terms of the scope of the terrain they seek to cover, which is multivalently global, persistently Trinidadian and achingly personal.
The book's opening segment, also titled Here, is prefaced by a quote from Valmiki's Ramayana, in which the Hindu God of creation, Brahma, insouciantly defends his congress with the demon Ravana as "just an elusive impulse." The gods and goddesses are present in Here, and not merely in the work's beginning. They linger throughout, making unsolicited intersections, muddling up their shoddy handiwork, and taking credit for brief flashes of human sophistication.Here has the reader unfurl yellowing, forgotten maps to the Indo-Trinidadian migrant's tale, elevating the established narrative beyond a vague sketch of the Fatel Razack. It furrows great, confessional fists into cane lands and forgotten barracks, bearing up the narrator's past, illuminating a genealogy, observed with shame by the aforementioned absentee gods who "pretended not to see the havans that flowered from the lonely Caroni Plains in fragrant ghee, or hear the plaintive bhajans that wavered like the flickers of wood-torch flames."
The collection's subsequent two sections, Yearning for the City and Toronto, are prefaced respectively by Thomas Hardy and Thomas Pynchon, in two separate lines of transience and self-supplanting, of intentional roving and leading oneself to a series of compass points for wayfarers. The journeys enacted here are immediate–each series of trips belongs to the narrator himself, who says, by the end of Yearning for the City, that he "waited to re-enter the old life–the island that lived in the eternal past. But then, having travelled beyond the sun, the story of my truer life had begun."The Dream Diary, Here's fourth movement, examines the speaker's life before, with and around his daughter, conducted in heroic couplets, laid out in a series of dated entries ranging from December 2005 to Valentine's Day, 2009. This extended paean to the merits of paternal richness discovering its own complexity could easily, and wrongly, be thought of as the book's most sentimental segment. Not so: the narrator wrangles with his logical sensibilities even while acknowledging the ways in which his daughter's presence has sunlit his life with beauty.
Possibly predictably but nonetheless with ardent concern, the narrator wonders, in his August 10, 2008 entry, the year in which he reads Milan Kundera's Life is Elsewhere, "whether there will even be laughter when my poems for you transform to smoke, when the characters of man and daughter are dispatched or erased by the impatient author."It is with the collection's final odyssey that the allusions to epic revisioning earn their keep: The Last Avatar, dedicated to Lloyd Best, structures the growth of the Caribbean in terms and titles of the Hindu pantheon, with the narrator perched somewhere in the theatrical gods, providing a blow-by-blow of the region's rise and fall, in repetitions of awe, conquest, of peasants who "increased their pain, and finally made it a feast–a yearly carnival of noise and delusion which became their mockery of salvation."A master class in technical savvy, Here straddles poetic forms with as much lucidity as it navigates spaces: blank verse gives way to terza rima as the poet leaps from city revels to personal scrapbooking in paternal scrawl. Ramcharitar has penned, without apologies either overt or nuanced, a remarkable verse peregrination: a masterful beast addressing temporality, kindness, the weight of mythos, and the often-paltry consolations of a stubbornly constant love.
