D. S. Maini: A Poet of The Aching Spirit

“As I rock from dream to dream/for seventy summers and more,/A Freudian river floods my old veins”. This is how Darshan Singh Maini, long familiar to the English and American teaching fraternity as a scholar critic, views his poetic creativity, “an offspring” of his declining years, amidst continuing health problems -- cervical spondylisis, spinal cold, obscure neurological disorder, extreme heaviness, tension and stiffness in the lower half etc -- “which have turned my twilight years/into wilderness of nerves and veins”.

Though Maini resents he started late, he strikes one as a mature poet, who sieves “Freudian ruins and remains” of more than two decades to conceive a volume of verse as “a truce with the ghosts/That rise still in revolt,/And still rage in aesthetic rout” (‘A House For Dreams’).

His first collection, A Reluctant Flame (1987) in noticeable for what Maini calls “emotional turmoil and buffoonery of emotions” while the second collection, A House for Dreams (1995) depicts his physical and spiritual anguish :

“I Have carved these poems of pain
Out of deep dark wood,
And I’ve crafted the knife
From my singing bones
Sabled by my obscure sins.

And when I move the knife
On that wood I hear a cry
From the depths of my heart.
The keen edge becomes keener
As I twist it in my soul.
(‘Poems of Pain’)

Poetry serves as a means to ease the mounting physical, mental, and spiritual tension : Maini’s intense personal agony incites him into a rage of words with self-criticism, self-pity, helplessness, despondence, complaints, and memories on the one hand and prepares him to surrender to God, to “turn to a nirvana/of some sort”, to yield to death “for instant release”, on the other.

He embarks on a search for the “white territory of peace” beyond the scalpel and pills to manage the body/will balance and to overcome a guilt-feeling of connections with “dubious gods” and “I’ve punished for/The sins I did not commit”.

He seeks solace in the Great Poetry of Gurbani, the word of words vis-a-vis the vital losses and awareness of the inner emptiness despite “the cargo of theories and thoughts” -- knowledge of Kafka, Conrad, Freud, Henry James, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Wordswoth, Keats, Yeats, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Vedas, and various histories, philosophies, politics etc.

His ‘confessions’ are intended to cure what Maini sees as the malignancies of his soul, to cleanse the ‘captive mind”, to escape “the trap of karma”, even as the critic in him is ever active to criticise the media and events : His imagination, “a striped fury on leash”, leaps out of skin at every opportunity and bares the chaotic social scene ravaged by “incestuous war of wits.” For example, the role of TV, books, and cards that keep mind and thought “hooked on dubious drugs,/ Opiates that’ll not work” (‘A Requiem’). And, the Golden Temple Tragedy in Punjab where both the killer and the killed suffer endless miseries.

The scholar critic in Maini vocalises his social concerns with an edge, imagistically representing the poet’s ironic vision. The frenzied phases of human animus prompt Maini the poet to observe: “... the killer/who pumped his lead into/My skull is not my foe;/...we both were needed/ To complete an absurd tale/God wrote in some hour of forgetfulness” (‘An Absurd Tale’). The poet can identify his ailing self with the deeper ailments that afflict all those humans “who live/to eat the bread of shame,/ And work out diurnally/ The fever of this horrendous day”.

Behind his personal woes -- physical and psychological, despondence, helplessness and selfpity, there is, however, a sense of awe and wonder: “Is this universe, then,/A grand but empty show,/ As Conrad thought in the end,/Or the creator’s lila on wheels?”

The poet admirably synthesises his personal concerns with the societal, or even higher, in an engaging tone and style, with scent of the traditional regional aroma as he reminisces the past or the debris of desires, or reflects on nature or “ruins and insolvencies” or purpose of one’s existence : “who’m I, then, and whence/ Began that exile a life ago ?/All I feel, though, is that/ The earth was sweet and fair/Even as some truths were upturned/And a cloud of ambiguities/Crossed the winter of my woes” (‘Thoughts on my 75th Birthday’).

Darshan Singh Maini’s poems bear testimony to the fact that he has a deeply religious attitude to and genuinely spiritual concern for humankind. Though he is at his best when personal or lyrical, his sensibility rests on a sensitivity for life and its values that stretch “beyond the bounds of thought,” “self and  all its frills”. However, the literary artist in him may some time turn archaic with frequent use of ah’s and oh’s even if this may indicate release of pentup emotions and feelings just as repetition of theme(s) occasionally seem to roughen the smooth flow of his over-all  poetic design.