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Body Loom

Athar Tahir is no newcomer to the enchanting world of poetry, no new practitioner of the art of composing poetry, no stranger to the poetic process so beautifully expressed by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He has spent decades, wandering, discovering, and exploring even the remote crevices and niches of this wilderness. He has experimented with various, forms, versions and varieties of this medium -- becoming in the process an adroit dealer, dabbler and handler of words, using and exploiting their meanings, shades and nuances to give to "airy nothing/a local habitation and a name". But Athar Tahir does not always give shape to "forms of things unknown", rather he often picks up the known, the mundane, and the common place and by the alchemy of his poetic genius turns them into something new, novel and unusual.

His poetry follows a negative bathos pattern. While bathos is the descent form the elevated to the mean, Athar's poems show, not a fall from sublime to commonplace; but ascend from the commonplace to the sublime; from the mean to the elevated; from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

The poem "Glow-worm" included in his latest volume of poems, Body Loom, is descriptive, completely in rhyme, though the length of the lines varies. The poet uses multiple similes to describe the glow-worm. In rhyme and rhythm they celebrate the insignificant, little insect, for what it is physically:

a wink of light, a slit in the night a lit fabric-tear a puckery presence, here, there a moon beam snip a flash on a tip... till, we come to the last line, which in a surprise move, gives the last metaphor which is not physical but metaphysical and even spiritual: and lost like a Sufi in the larger light.

The complex poem is remarkable for the rhyme scheme and craftsmanship, as also for presenting the event in a new and different light. But perhaps the most striking thing about the poem is that the real poem begins where the actual poem ends - the trail of bloodshed and the agony and trauma of the people that followed the drawing of the line. The consequences of "what he had lit." The last line triggers an unwritten poem in the readers' mind about the baggage of history and man's baser, and finer, instincts. Apparently saying little, the poem actually says much more - combining the impact of what is said with what is left unsaid.

The passing years, the ways of the world, friendship and betrayals, cares and worries, ups and downs of life, have all burnished the poet. And mellowed the man. The mellowness though, is laced, with a little more bitterness, a little more indignation. After years and years of carefully perfecting the art of writing good prose and poetry, words now come easily to him. Only an idea, a theme, a leitmotiv is to be conceived and conjured up by him and words, in rhyme and rhythm of their own, seem to flow effortlessly, and join together like the jigsaw pieces of a mosaic to give shape to "airy nothings" born out of a fusion of intellect and intuition.

Author: M Athar Tahir