What should the roots of authenticity clasp? What forms the core of our ancestry? Is it cultural? Biological? Historic? Anthropometric?
Would a Buddha have served you better/ for this space? /Or a black and white snap of your dad /when he was young? /Or a water colour of backwater Salvinia /from your childhood? /Or a forest rising from the antlers /of stolen Gond deer?
These questions, among other intriguing ones, engage the reader in The Coppiced House, a collection of poems by the debut author Jyotish Gopinathan. A product of Writers Worksop Kolkata, this brilliantly curated book, structured on themes of architecture and design, examines the nuances of the relationship between nature, the built world, and the inner life of the individual.
The poet explores spaces, both within oneself and in the outside world, and meditates on their impermanence. On a hillside that is excoriated by an excavator (Iron claws), or in a house that remains standing in quiet defiance of time, yet exacting a price from its occupant (Forever), the poems navigate the tension between the fleeting nature of life itself and one’s desire to leave indelible marks on it.
A desperate pining for other lives is palpable, a quest for alternate destinies is seen demanded, speaking to the poet’s preoccupation with evanescence.
I would like to crack open/ a door. / Rise with a fern leaf / on chiselled rock. (Opening doors)
Will leaves be the new town, / the forest, once again, my nation? / Will I nestle among rocks, as / the inert dust, of spent things? (Dreaming of homes).
The poet’s fine sensitivity to imagery adds a rich texture to the work. The blurring of boundaries between the human and the natural world is often evoked through fresh metaphors. The ‘humanisation’ of plants, for example in The Names of Trees, where parallels are drawn between trees and the events that shape a person’s life, catches the eye. The snapshots of a tree struck down by thunder or used to fuel a funeral pyre are reminders of the cycles of life and death, both personal and collective. Plants appear as symbols for steely defiance more than once in this book (Weeds and Fishtail).
Dwelling and being in spaces are inspected in detail in The Coppiced House. In the preface the poet quotes from Martin Heidegger’s essay Poetically man dwells, drawing on the parallels between poetic creation and building. Heidegger’s hut itself is referenced in one of the poems- The philosopher’s hut, serving as a metaphor for the darkness of ideologies that hide within the brilliance of intellect. The tenderness of human bonding in dwelling places, is experienced in poems like The things that we do together and Spaces, clear water pools.
The first section of the book, on building and designing, delves into a breadth of issues, including ethics (To build is to remember and Unerased), aesthetics (Mirrors) and futility of human endeavour (The house on the hill and Cocoons). The titular poem, The Coppiced house appears to dwell on a cycle of regeneration at first glance, until a closer reading reveals sketches of the ominous undertones and the recurrence of loss.
The Coppiced House refuses to offer simple resolutions. There is no cliched condemnation of the human tendency to impose order on nature. Instead, readers are invited to imbibe the haunting beauty in the tension between the natural and the artificial, similar to the concept of ‘counterpoint’ in music, where two melodies coexist independently, while creating harmony. The poem Counterpoint in the collection serves as an exemplification of this idea. Images are presented one beside the other, like photographs, allowing the reader to form their own connections between them and the unified whole. These poems are not ones that explain themselves away to mediocrity.
Jyotish Gopinathan’s well crafted, subtle and restrained work is a remarkable debut, notable for its philosophical depth. The Coppiced house invites readers to reflect on the fragility of purpose and the search for meaning. This is poetry that has arrived.
