A Book Review

"The Selected Shorter Poems" of Dr. K. K. Mathew is one of the finest collections of poems I have read of any English poets from India. While many of the 158 poems are relatively metaphysical in nature, others deal with his emotions, tactile sensibilities, feelings and attitudes.

In order to critically appreciate his poems, we need to understand the background of Dr. Mathew and the landscape where he composed many of these poems. As a highly specialized missionary physician and medical scientist who practices among a socially, religiously, and economically diverse population in the most magnificent rural part of Southern Kerala, Mathew is surrounded by bountiful nature, especially unique tropical flora and fauna. This is the backdrop he used to depict many short poems, especially poems relating to nature. He portrays his emotions, feelings, and sentiments with a broad-brush at times, but other times with surgical precision and denotative and connotative meanings.

The entire collection of his 158 shorter poems was further classified into five major parts: Emblematic Poems, Poems of Nature, Facetious Poems, Whimsical Poems, and Devotional Poems. In all these categories, he has chosen ordinary daily events, experiences, and things and gave them superficial and deeper mystical meanings using literary devices such as imagery, metaphors and allegory to get his points across. The beauty of his poems lies in portraying ordinary events and things with extraordinary insights using a lucid poetic language.

The “Cockroaches Never Die” stands out as a highly metaphorical as well as an allegorical poem. In this poem, he uses allegories as literary devices and connotative and denotative symbolic imageries to portray how, even after the cockroaches in the storeroom were exterminated with a dose of poison, there were still others who were coming out of the crevices with their antennas stuck out to sense annihilation. Even these most disgusting insects have developed instinctive evolutionary skills for survival. Nighttime criminals are sometimes compared to cockroaches that embody evil. By using the allegorical and metaphorical literary devices and images, he epitomizes cockroaches as evil that survives and flourishes despite punishment and extermination! As he said, “They always find a crevice/That shows them the way/Back to the air, the light, and to us.”

One of the best poems I liked was the “Infallibility of Time.” This poem depicts the intimate relationship of life and death. According to this poem, “death” begins to follow us the day we are born. The reality is that we live always in its presence. The following lines are so beautiful for those who love the magic of words:

Everybody knows it, that Death 

Begins when one is born and 

One lives always in its presence.

These great poetic lines of Mathew can be readily placed at the footstone of the most celebrated poet, Emily Dickinson, as an offering to venerate her. His lines have the similar power and beauty of the exquisite and flawless lines of Emily Dickinson’s very famous lines, “Because I could not stop for death...” Both Dickinson and Mathew through their powerful lines have personified “death.”

Mathew covers a wide variety of topics in his poetic depiction. His topics include philosophical, intellectual, and psychological themes. The “Dog Fear” is a highly psychological poem that deals with zoophobia (fear of animals) or more specifically Cynophobia. He uses both tactile, aural, visual and metaphorical imageries to depict the psychosis of a cynophobic whose life was crippled by this phobia. This poem is a masterful portrayal of the mental disorder of an individual with Cynophobia. Mathew spares no detail in this poem. He creates lyrical emotions with figurative words that elicit both denotative and connotative meanings about the symptoms of this phobia and how it progresses:

 

The dog followed him everywhere;

In the mirror he never saw his self, 

For the dog hid under his reflection. 

The dog was with him like his shadow. 

When he talked to his friends,

He heard its growl in their voices.

By using words that create connotative meanings such as, “followed,” “dog hid under his reflection,” and “shadow,” he elicits lyrical emotions. When he uses the word “growl,” the reader gets the aural, visual and tactile imagery of the dog really growling and one could understand the intensity of the psychosis of the cynophobic that he is depicting. Mathew vividly portrays the phobia’s culmination through these poetic words: “And he became a bone in its mouth.” As I finished reading this final line, I got the same pleasure that I usually get when I sit through the grand finale of a great musical rendition.

Mathew’s poem the “Mystery of the Surface” is one of the best I liked in all his collection. Yes, as Mathew says, “there exists something beneath every surface.” This is science in its purest sense! This is nanoscience depicted poetically and artistically by the genius of this poet who is also a medical scientist. If you scan the surface of matter using an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), there are several layers of atoms bound by atomic force under the surface. Yes, “there is something beneath a woman’s bosom, another surface:”

I pluck every petal, 

there is nothing under 

except another surface.

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I realize that there is

something beneath a woman’s 

bosom, another surface

of kindness, love and care. 

Every surface conceals another. 

Mystery is simply,

a manipulation of surfaces

Art lies on concealing art.

According to Freud and the philosophy of Eastern Yogis, even the human mind and personality have several layers. These layers are like the onion; when you peel the surface layer, another layer appears. When you peel one layer of anything in this material universe, there appears another layer. Mother “earth” itself has several layers. And, Mathew through this poem is telling us that such is the mystery of life in this universe! He says, “mystery is simply a manipulation of surfaces.” Of course, “art lies on concealing art.” These exquisite poetic lines exemplify the mysteries of life and art in this material universe.

Another poem, I loved most was “My Little Bird.” By employing a metaphorical literary device called “personification” and with visual, aural, and tactile imageries, he portrays a “little bird” that flew away from his cage. I presume these metaphorical images vividly depicts an “empty nest syndrome” the poet might have personally experienced when his children moved away. From his use of a second person imagery of “He,” it can be surmised that the poet got the “blues” when his son “flew away” in search of his own career and to raise his own family.

But he has flown away

Into the freedom of the sky.

He will not get the food I gave, 

He will not be safe as before,

But he is happy, for he can 

Wander to a world without limits.

The most beautiful poem that awakened the nostalgic feelings in me was titled, “The Beggars.” Mathew has used figurative words and images in vividly painting the poignant and heart-breaking scenes from the underbelly of rural Kerala that many of us have suppressed into our subconscious from our childhood days:

These same beggars every where

At every church and at every temple,

We visit on festival times.

There is always the gaunt mother, 

Nursing the same gaunt baby suckling 

The dried, milk less breasts, then

The leper man on a four-wheeled cart 

And the articulated singer at the wayside.

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Yes, I personally tried to put away into my own subconscious mind the sight of the dried “milk-less breasts” and the poignant movement of “the leper man on a four-wheeled cart” that symbolized the abject poverty that was once around us. These metaphorical images he used in these lines told the story of a terribly impoverished past of rural Kerala where these leprous and poor beggars flocked around during the festival seasons to appeal to our compassion for filling their stomachs.

“An Alzheimer Patient” is a rare poem that depicted the pathological symptoms and demeanor of an Alzheimer’s patient. The symptoms of this progressive disease that causes severe dementia in patients are accurately portrayed with visual images by the poet who is also a consummate healer and medical scientist. The words “stay frozen” “trying to remember, to find” create denotative and connotative meanings of the pathological symptoms and complications of the Alzheimer’s disease and its resulting dementia.

I stay frozen and glance at 

the wall pictures, furniture, 

and at my own hands 

trying

to remember, to find, 

to locate, to understand 

what time, what place, 

and what I am.

There are scores of exquisite and flawless poems in Dr. Mathew’s collection. Some of the devotional poems are very appropriate for conversion to devotional songs. “He Awaits Outside” is an awesome piece of poetry! One of the poems that appealed to my sensibility the most was titled, “To My Love.” This poem will spark the romantic sensibility in anyone who carefully reads it. The following lines especially evokes lyrical emotions in the reader in a most profound way:

Love is a momentary destruction, 

a combustion that threatens

the pure creature we love.

“The Selected Shorter Poems” of Dr. K. K. Mathew is a delightful treat for all who love the magic and power of words; undoubtedly, it will be a feast for the ones with poetic sensibilities. I recommend this collection to anyone who loves reading poetry.

(This book review is written by Matthew Isaac, Ph.D., Former Associate Vice Chancellor, California)