By Willie Gordon Suting
Menangtei Kuparlang Thangkhiew’s poetry collection Matchsticks and Combustible Dreams is an insult to the art of poetry. Poems with terseness should comment multi-dimensionally.
Thangkhiew’s voice is weak not due to his age but because of bad taste. From poverty of poetic construction, thematic concealment and layered metaphors, it is evident the young poet is not able to figure out the basics.
In Divided to Fall, hackneyed narrative that the world is full of class and caste divisions though “all those the Lord had put together/to live under the same sun” do not offer freshness of insight.
Thangkhiew, who is from Nongkseh, describes a lover’s “faith” in a woman as a “mystery”. Faith comes from sincerity of the heart and cannot be termed a mystery. These words in the poem On the Fence end oddly with the lines “to love and not look back/does feel like a mistake”.
Poems like Rooftop Memories do not make sense at all. Thangkhiew describes two friends smoking and getting high “waiting for the day/to ease on by”. The quotidian here is devoid of beauty or charm.
Sea, though not well written has somewhat acceptable take on disillusionment. The 19-year-old poet describes the ocean’s beckoning call to leave behind all the comfort of dry land. There is poignancy in how he expresses sinking “into the darkness of the deep blue, and drown in its caress”.
A Thing of Innocence relies on flawed observation when the poet describes beauty of a flower, and how man marvels at such a sight.
Lines like “We left home/In search of new beginnings/But only found emptiness/and homesickness” from the poem The Pale Blue Dot are too conversational in tone and expression of language. In fact, there is a profusion of such lines throughout the collection.
Literary and poetic language, as a norm, has to be written with high refinement, reflecting good poetic taste.
Thangkhiew, in As the World Burns, does not subtly substantiate the title as he says in a verse the soul though is eternal and that in the green meadows he will lie.
He describes the process of growing up in a poem of the book’s title. Dreams that alter into disillusionment, though, cannot be concluded in such a line like “Afraid of the fire that burnt us then”. Such a line shows how complacent Thangkhiew is with slotting in elderly advice without offering novel insights.
Thangkhiew connects words devoid of logic when he writes “roots of fate” describing life. Fate denotes what man is destined to, and does not always imply our roots.
In the poem Colours, lines such as “We are more than the colours/that our skin was painted with” are full of illogicality.
The question arises as to how could Thangkhiew describe a particular community’s skin complexion as being painted by someone? This goes on and on as the poet says we “must give up the flying cars” in his attempt to describe society today. Flying cars in fact are still non-existent even in the most developed of countries.
It is common for young poets like Thangkhiew to commit blunders in language, style and theme. Maybe, such things are part of the process in growing as an artiste. Thangkhiew should come out with penetrativeness concealed intelligently to make it as a poet.
Book: Matchsticks and Combustible Dreams; Author: Menangtei
Kuparlang Thangkhiew; Publisher: Dhauli Books; Pages: 42;
Price Rs 150