Stories of stardust

KOCHI: Vismaya Mohanlal writes with a candid directness that is the regular defining feature  of the poetry of the young.  Almost everyone who chooses to write poetry for the first time, have an obsessive compulsive urge to open up, to reveal the self in all its naked fullness. So I am not surprised when I read Vismaya write, “ A pencil to my heart/ The lead slowly makes it way through/ Willing the words to bleed.” See how nonchalantly she ends up in invoking the archetypal image of the “bleeding words.” Little wonder then that, in such highly charged, passionate writing, love becomes the only thing that matters. 

Images, resonances and chiaroscuro of love abound in these poems; desire for union, pangs of separation, transience of togetherness, falsity of promises, illusions of oneness.... She keeps going back and forth between all these perennial themes of love with an endearing honesty. But the simplicity of the act is startling at times: “ How could I let this happen again?/ How could I give my heart away/ When I just got it back?” 

I must confess that as I was reading  “ Grains of Stardust,” I couldn’t help thinking about the reification/ commodification of poetry that has been taking place for more than a few decades now. On the one hand, with the ever growing sway of the social media and digital platforms, writing— not just poetry, but writing per se— , having been freed from editorial tyranny, has become open and democratic, and, quite alarmingly, on the other hand, it gets sieved into an empty form,devoid of the rich complexities of human existence or political anxieties, which comes handy for the upper class to flaunt their “intellectual/ philosophical” inner self.

No doubt, Vismaya Mohanlal is grown as a privileged child; but her writing shows that she chooses poetry to address some genuine existential problems that harrow her inner life. She is incessantly plagued by the split within her which she addresses constantly, even celebrates sensuously: 
“My mind/ An abstract painting/ My thoughts/ Have no beginning/ Stuck somewhere in between/ I move around in circles/ Swimming in colors/ A delicious confusion.” In a more confessional strain, she says, “ “Staring into emptiness/ I see my reflection/ I wear many masks.” 

The act of reading “ Grains of Stardust,” I mean the very act of understanding or making sense of it, is mediated through the poet’s own illustrations. Of course, Vismayas drawings add onto the density of the text. The interface between word-pictures and illustrations does not resolve the ambiguities of her writing; rather, it heightens them.

“Grains of Stardust” definitely promises there’s more to look forward to from Vismaya Mohanlal. Her writing  is truthful and uninhibited, yet, subtle and controlled. There is no deliberate gimmickry to be shocking and daring. The razor sharp simplicity of many of her lines will leave us somewhat perturbed: “ My heart he takes/ One bite at a time/ A delicious cake/ He chews slowly.”The author is a renowned film director, screenwriter, and distributor known for his work in Malayalam cinema