From http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/article3729459.ece
It has often been remarked that Dom Moraes was a fantasist, that he was someone who did not understand or love his country, and so on. After his death, many journalists who knew him dispelled this unfair criticism. Hoskote, who has previously written about this in an obituary on the poet, clarifies this notion yet again in the introduction. He quotes Moraes from a previous interaction, “I don’t feel particularly Indian, but I don’t feel particularly British either, anymore... But that shouldn’t stop me from relating with empathy as one human being to other human beings, should it?” For me, the third and the most touching quality about Moraes’s work is the startling awareness of what he detested in India and the way this was interwoven into his personal crises. It is not a journalistic or idealistic ideal driving this awareness. Nor can it be seen as a poet’s ‘responsibility’ to write about realities other than his/her own. It is an earnest, personal and exquisite expression of a dilemma. The poem that best describes this for me is ‘Letter to My Mother’, in which Moraes outlines the troubled relationship with his mother: “...You sit alone with your Church/ And the memory of the son/ You have scarcely seen./ You pray he may be spared/ For the arms of the blue wife/ God raped in an orchard. You do not understand me... Your eyes are like mine./ When I last looked in them/ I saw my whole country,/ A defeated dream/ Hiding itself in prayers... Your dream is desolate./ It calls me every day/ But I cannot enter it.” The poems in this collection and the painstakingly put together notes and biography allow us to appreciate why Dom Moraes was one of the seminal figures of poetry in India. “In the gallery of my head clear images hang,/ When only the flesh is left for the sun to dry,/ and skulls are left where once the sweet birds sang.” (‘After the Operation’) So ends the last poem in the collection, also one of the last poems written by Moraes. And in the Shakespearean melancholy we find the same sweet innocence. ---- Ranjit Hoskote will release and read from Dom Moraes: Selected Poems on Aug 17 at 6.00 pm at International Centre Goa, as part of the ongoing Goa Arts + Literarty Festival activities that culminate on 13-17 December 2012. Register here: http://www.goaartlitfest.com/registration.htm
