A Vagrant Mirror

Satyapal Anand's poetry is cerebral rather than emotional. It reveals a many splendored splash of color and sound. His poems reveal the essential mythopoeic self present in the poet himself, as in all humanity. Again, his personae are all inside his poems. "Here" and "now" or "there" and "beyond" combine and create word collages. By authenticating the effects of the vision and perceptions underlying them, his images give us new ways of seeing the world. There is a kind of double vision involved in it. His is the imagist's faculty for seeing a thing at once precisely for itself and, at the same time, as part of a larger phenomenon. Many of his poems are dramatic monologues. In these the speaker does not speak in a vacuum. When he speaks or acts, it reflects the time, place, thought, social conventions, and general circumstances; but it also impinges upon political, philosophical, and religious shades of meaning that transgress the immediacy of the situation. Caroline Greene says that nothing extraordinary has happened in American poetry in the past half a century, and if an Urdu poet of Satyapal Anand's stature chooses to bring his treasure house to the English-speaking word, it is likely to change the entire scenario here. It is precisely because the poet recovers the extracultural, historic-mythological ground of humanity as a whole that American poets have lost in "localizing" their poetry.