On Ruskin Bond's poetry
He is one of India's best known writers, gifted with a light, versatile pen, producing an astonishing array of writing in nearly all genres for nearly fifty years. In his introduction to this Book of Verse he writes that a character of a novel he wrote…yes, fifty years back, named Rusty (read Ruskin) is told by his friend Kishen that "One day you'll be a writer or an actore or something. Maybe a poet! Why not a poet, Rusty?"
And so Rusty-Ruskin did go on to be a writer, of prose chiefly, but only because he had to make a "living from the written word." At heart, though, poetry remained his first love, and the author occasionally slipped his "poems into my prose works and anthologies when my publishers weren't looking." Penguin India decided that instead of forcing one of its best-selling writer (and poet) into underhanded subterfuge, why not publish his poems within the covers of a single book. Thus we have here Ruskin's volume of poetry, old-fashionedly lyrical and versatile, written with a feel for the short English line and poetic form acquired from decades of dealing in the language, shot through with nostalgia for a vanished Anglo-Indian way of life and love of Mussorie, the hill station within whose piney heights Rusty-Ruskin has sequestered himself these last few decades.
Secondhand Shop in Hill Station
The smell of secondhand goods
Is everywhere. Lost causes,
Lonely lives, and deaths in small cottages
Among the pines, meet here in the mildewed dark
Of his shop--Abdul Salam, Proprietor.
Tales of a hundred failures
And ten hundred broken dreams.
A hat-pin and an Iron Cross
Lie down with a blackened pistol,
While a bronze Buddha smiles across
At a plastic doll from Bristol.
Old clothes, old books (perhaps a first edition?),
A dressing-gown, a dagger marked with rust.
A card for some lost Christmas,
And inside, a letter:
'Dear Jane, I am getting better.'
A Chinese vase and a china-dog.
The shop is cold and thick with dust,
The Mall is far from grand;
But Abdul Salam grows prosperous
In a suit that's secondhand.
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