On Reading Keki N. Daruwalla Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

The Robert Browning of modern Indian English poetry,
He is a writer of dramatic monologues
Where the action is internal,
Not external,
Happening within,
Taking in
And the characters
Like dramatic personae
Participating.

Robust and unsentimental, cathartic and purgatory,
He explores in his own way
The cultural, sociological and psychological
Spaces of man,
A poet sardonic and sarcastic,
Hard of heart and mocking,
The shots from the barrel of the gun
Saying it all.

A Padma Shri expected to come to him earlier,
Now has in 2014,
A writer
So cocooned and kernelled,
With the meaning muffled and muted in
When the words uncoated,
The layers of the onion peeled off,
A poet full of internal rhyme, curtal vocabulary,
Succinct, synoptic and verbose
And bombastic.

In the beginning, he used to dwell upon the things
Of the U.P. and its mountainous regions,
But his assignment with the RAW
Taking him to different climes and spaces
And he borrowing from
To crisscross us
With his knowledge of nationalities and foreign histories,
A poet of a different psyche and space,
Travelling and telling about life differently.