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"Eden Gardens and other poems"
Summary by Dr.V.S.Gopalakrishnan
This book published from Mumbai in 1996 evoked comments from Vasantha Surya, an English poet based in Chennai, as a unique book of English poems by a married couple apart perhaps from the Shelleys. Revathy Gopal, the really acclaimed English poet, a winner of awards at national level, has written thus, to sample one of her poems:
LOOKING AT JOURNEY’S END
Trips abroad
are for the young,
not for middle-aged
women like me,
who need their night’s sleep
And whose ankles swell
on night journeys.
Hovercraft ! It might as well
have been a papyrus boat
for all that the Channel cares!
Did you enjoy the Louvre?
I thought the Giaconda
looked pale.
Journeys to the East
seem to tire her out
as well.
Give me
a warm bed on a winter
morning, steaming coffee
in my favourite
earthenware mug
and you can have
your Grecian isles
and week ends
at Cannes.
Revathy Gopal unfortunately passed away on 7 March 2007. Her husband Varakur Gopalakrishnan (V.S.Gopalakrishnan) has contributed several published poems in this book. A couple of his poems are given below:
THE REAL
There are those
Who believe
What’s real
Is corporeal;
For those
Near the end
Of life’s journey
What’s real
Is spiritual.
THE FUNNY MAN
One is born with two eyes
So one can choose to cry,
And a tender little throat
That tends to be parched and dry.
One has two nostrils
So that one can blow either one;
Our teeth are no mere frills,
Ready to bite someone!
We have two ears surplus
After coming of the contact lens;
We have two legs in excess
Thanks to Henry Ford’s success.
One has a mind of one’s own
Usually lost on someone else;
Yet the body pushes to the town
In search of much more pretty belles.
We have six senses
Highest among living things;
But this thing called common sense
Is something which never clings.
Such is man, a guest
Of earth he’s come to reap;
Charlie Chaplin had been laid to rest
But he has not gone to sleep.
One would believe that really-speaking a poem written should be spontaneous and not a product that takes place after endless chiseling, leaving aside the long and complex ones. And in today’s world, there are poems and poems of every form and shape, shade and meanings, sense and nonsense that only the fastidiously self promoting ones end up as recognized poets. Yet the breed is dying as the people’s habit of reading itself is dying thanks to the wonders of electronics and the media.
Review by Dr.V.S.Gopalakrishnan, Mumbai.
Published: October 03, 2007
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