'Map of Memories': Experimental poems resonate with the poet's identity as migrant, scholar, thinker

“Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity.”

The alliterative swag in the title of Ashwani Kumar’s latest poetry collection, Map of Memories, a 32-page chapbook, is intriguing. Reiterating Marcel Proust’s search for lost time, Kumar’s “remembrance of things past” re-views his emotional and cognitive travel across history. Characterised by a flow of disjointed images of topos, memory in the title “map of memories” is an abstraction. It speaks through mnemonic symbols for exploring the identity landscapes. Like TS Eliot’s Prufrock, the speaker representing the poet’s persona in the poems is a representative of an angst-ridden modern society. Embodying its chaos, he feels like a “biographical puzzle” that problematizes the concepts of home and belonging.

Bombay’s English poetic afterlife

The book cover, a piece of expressionist artwork by Sudhir Patwardhan, showcasing the cityscape of Pokharan in Thane, serves as a fitting introduction to the first and the longest poem, “An Imaginary Map of My City.” This poem is a restless, hallucinatory archive of Anglophone poetry in Bombay, mapping the city as a shifting, polyphonic text shaped by its poets – Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel, Jeet Thayil, Ranjit Hoskote, Arundhati Subramaniam among others – and the remnants of its histories. Kumar negotiates...

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