The Lake Fewa & A Horse. ISBN81-85693-34-X 2005 Hardcover pp.108. Rs.250 Indian.
Poems New
by Yuyutsu RD Sharma
Reading Yuyustu RD’s Fewa poem is a truly rewarding experience. Written over a decade, these poems astonish you with their stunning metaphors and reveal the poet’s marvelous grasp over the language, landscape and the people living in it.
Once out of campus circus circles, quitting teaching at Tribhuban University, Yuyustu made his first visit to Lake Fewa in the early 90s. The visit turned out to be a lifetime’s passion and commitment.
The book begins on the vast watery expanses of the Lake where a lonely boat appears somewhere between shafts of sunlight and moves on to bring alive the people of distant regions struggling like mules beneath the shimmering daggers of the Annapurna.
Exploring the mystique of the world’s highest mountains, the poet reverts to his own past, his roots in Punjab and struggle to survive in Delhi. His poems unleash the fretful rambling of an honest individual in the corridors of a bleeding democracy as he flings his illuminated manuscripts into the jaws of skyscrapers and finally returns to turquoise lakes of perfect, deep sleep.
Here we have a magnificent collection—compelling and condensed with rare visions, crying from the agony of the contemporary times.
“Yuyutsu R.D. lives close to the Everest. His poetry climbs mountains, swims in rivers and paints the falling leaves in copper. This tango with nature also occurs when Yuyutsu R.D.closes the window for a moment…” – Ronny Someck, in Iton 77.
“Yuyustu R.D. Sharma’s poetry runs clear, tender, and passionate with a rage that often erupts volcanic in the face of the cruelty, despair, and injustice that saddles the disenfranchised poor of the earth. Poems powerful and devastating yet gentle as flower petals wafting to earth in a summer breeze.” – Michael Annis, senior editor, Howling Dog press.
“Yuyustu R.D. Sharma has his feet firmly planted on the ground. His poetry is rooted in its landscape and environment and thereby gains its strength. He has also served the muse assiduously over the decades and small wonder that she has rewarded him.” – Keki N. Daruwalla
Book Extracts
A Morning Walk
Leaving behind
the bed of white lotus
and wheezing
partner of my sleep
I rushed out
towards the bridge
freshly built over
a golden stream.
But on finding
a funeral pyre
burning on its
emerald edge
I closed my eyes
and like some Buddha
in the dark interior
raised my shaking,
invisible hands
to salute
the great master
Death.
.
The Lake Fewa, an Unfinished Poem
From the shoulder of a hill
from a garden restaurant where
exhausted tourists lie, massaging
hysteric limbs of a nightmare,
from dingy tea-shop
of a grandma, crying from
the smoke of her charred dreams,
from the balcony
of a hut where a blonde Buddhist nun
sleeps with a local drug addict,
from Naudada,
from Lumle, from the luminous sheets
of the windows of a racing car
or like a despot
of once a famished principality, Sarangkot,
from an airplane
with nose of snobbery ticking
the gleaming summits of fishtail
from the colorful pages
of a coffee table book,
from the fury of the goddess
who created the lake to avenge
the unkind inhabitants of the valley,
from the sunken sockets
of a porter’s eyes where
magnificent draggers of Himal have grown,
from the obscene columns
of a magazine on frozen peaks of Himal,
printed from the evil ink donated
by some treacherous NGO,
from the bedroom of trekking couple,
about to reach an orgasm in unison,
from the bleeding eye of a folksinger
in love with local Sahu’s daughter,
from the prow of a ferry
scurrying over surface to measure its secrets,
from the tip of the fishtail
where lamblike sun bounces defunct,
from the unfinished draft
of this poem that I tear off
to look at the blue
of the Eye-lake, Fewa.
