Easterine Kire’s latest book Freerain is a collection of some of her poems written over different phases of her life, reflecting in them her peripatetic sojourns and her encounters with people. Norway, Nagaland, Aizawl, and Calcutta are some of the places in which these poems find their address.
One can say that these poems are peopled with presences – places, faces, animals, tempers, and emotions that the writer has navigated in this journey of her life. In some sense, the book can be read as an autobiography where the author uses images and symbols to tell the story of her life.
Faces meld into each other, the fog of the morning blooms into the mist of the sea, scarecrows and soldiers meet the pitter-patter of the rain, while the recollection of her mother’s last years dissolves into the song of the sparrow. Such are some of the images that Kire invokes in her poems, through which she maps the major themes running through the book, in particular, that of nostalgia, remembrance, love and freedom.
In two poems written for/on her mother, Mother’s Earthleavingness and Sparrows, Kire addresses the corporeality of the human condition. Seeing her aged mother grow light as a bird months before her passing, the author compares her mother’s feet to a dancer’s as “they limbered away/ lithe as a dancer’s/ so ready/ for her long flight home”.
Here, Kire takes comfort in the thought that her mother’s passing was not one that was painful or difficult, reminiscing “It was that easy to leave earth behind”. On the adjacent page, the poem “Sparrows” portrays the poet in a meditative light as she tries to move on with her life after her mother’s passing. The sparrows in the eaves she says, would “eat the feed spilled on the edges”, like surveyors across a landscape waiting on business. The aim of these poems, perhaps, is the recovery of memory.
Perhaps one of the most visual poems of the collection is Narcissus, from her 1982 collection, Kelhoukevira. In it, she sketches, even as she is rattled with a sleepless night in wintry Calcutta, efflorescent images of a city bubbling with life, intersecting these images with glimpses of North East India’s National Highway 37.
It is clear in this poem that Kire is absorbed by the sights and sounds she encounters on the daily, even as she sheds off those images into the poem writing, “I saw a thousand gipsy summers/ ride down Midnight Avenue. I travelled/ National Highway 37/ and spoke to the wild geese at dawn/ I heard the paddy birds in the rice field singing Ave Maria/ And when the thorn bird brought me back/ you did not hear my goodbye”.
Similarly, poems like Tree in July, End of Autumn, Moon in Winter, I Speak to the Trees, Freerain and Song of the Wind recognise the ubiquitous power of nature.
Kire efficiently uses images and symbols from nature to meditatively engage with nostalgia, as seen in the lines from the poem “I Speak to Trees” where she lyrically writes – “I climbed a tree today/ and on a swaying branch/ the wind sang in my ears… ran together like old friends/ ran together like old friends”.
Some more poignant poems are the ones set in Nagaland such as “Maps”, a poem that sheds light on the traditional knowledge of hunters who traverse the deep depths of the forests. In this poem, she acknowledges the benevolence and power of the spirits and entities who “hides you from danger by night/ while the river that sparkled in the afternoon sun/ turns treacherous after dusk”. Kire’s distinct way of integrating cultural attitudes in such poems is important as it creates a portrait of Naga culture.
Poems like “Life is a Log Drum” also depart with this imperative.
Kire as a novelist and Kire as a poet seem like two sides of the same coin. Her verse employs much of the distinct style of her prose where vivid images are invoked to create a world in which the writer is both central and peripheral to the sentiment of the moment.
In both dimensions of writing, she treads on unhurriedly, taking and basking in the worlds that beckon her.
As she writes, “I came here to play witness for it soothes my spirit to see them go by…”, the poems in Freerain see, hear, smell, touch and taste the different tempers of time.
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