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Across the bridge of praises The year’s last big literary meet was organized by Mahboob Zafar to celebrate Izharul Haque’s Iqbal award for his fourth collection of verse, Pani Pe Bichha Takht (The Floating Throne) that was chosen from amongst 2000 books for the honour. Two thousand books! Goodness gracious, this is a huge lot of poetry. A people giving so much time to the Muse, to coining and cloning metaphors and seaming together similes, cannot have much time left for more useful inventions. But at the same time we may sing to our Lord’s glory we have people here yet who are keeping the printing presses in business while adding their mite to the aesthetics of life in a growing bazaar society. It was not only a sizable gathering but as one scholar noted an assemblage of Islamabad’s reading and writing citizenry — a quality crowd that is, but a crowd nevertheless that Bacon said was ‘no company’ at all and ‘faces were but a gallery of pictures’ — an acute observation that he wouldn’t have made had he been in this appreciative company. They had come to shower eulogies, without ifs and buts, on a poet who from all appearances is not much of a PR fellow. He is a man of few words, almost laconic, which is a quality out of this time when the knack for inter-personal relationship is one big invariable all ‘situations vacant’ notices hanker after. But Izharul Haque is very much his own man and is known to keep to himself in a kind of selective invisibility that permits one to see without being seen. Like most meetings at the Pakistan Academy of Letters and all official junkets the gathering was an unqualified success. Rauf Ameer, without doctoral airs, read a long adulatory piece from his book on the poet after a glowing comment that a gentleman read for Dr Najiba Arif. This was followed by a somewhat more tempered appraisal of Izhar’s verse that Prof Jalil Aali presented. One waited, as must have Izharul Haque himself, for some observation that could point or at least suggest an area in the poet’s work that was not as strong as other features of his verse. But even the faintest allusion of that kind remained unexpressed. From that point of view it was a rather dull and one-sided colloquium. Javed Chaudhry who writes such lucid columns and possesses the facility of making a point evaluated Izhar’s calling him his prose model. That was something. Iftikhar Arif dilated on the rivalry that exists among contemporary poets who keep an eye on the work of their rivals and yet, he asserted, should admire a good piece of verse if they want the Muse to keep them in the business of making good poetry. The award, he said, was an acknowledgement of Izhar’s outstanding work in which one found the continuity of our tradition, a strong reflection of Iqbal’s eastern ilan in an idiom that was entirely and recognizably the poet’s own cultivated in the raw indigenity of his poetic soil. At the end, across the bridge of praises, amidst loud applause, Izhar recited his Whitmanesque poem on Trees. ***** Poets seem to be giving a lot of attention to naming their books and spending a lot of time and money on designing the title covers. Packaging your product attractively is the first requirement of good salesmanship. The name of the book should be catchy if the name of the author is not catching. Then comes the design and the colour scheme whether it is related to the title or the theme or not. Once upon a time it was not uncommon for poetry books to feature beautiful women on the cover. Now poets have replaced the beauties with their own glamorous likenesses on the back cover. Then, with the onset of modern poetry, abstractions started to represent the complexity of the poet’s thought daring readers if there were any. Size and volume is also important as we see in tooth paste tubes. Poetry is faced with this problem particularly as verses even when weighty make a slim volume. Printers are, therefore, advised to use bold type faces with larger margins in the manner of falsies that damsels in distress use. This is of course not about Tariq Naeem’s award winning collection which is no less beautifully produced and no less attractively titled as Diyay mein Jalti Raat (The night burning in the lamp)! Amazing imagery, like the world falling on itself! Wrapped in nocturnal black the verses make a gloomy reading with the image of the night dressed as a lady aflame in the heart wailing on all pages. But the good thing about the book itself apart from its stylish look is that it carries no crutches of critical support on its back flap or anywhere else. The poet offers his work without trying to influence the readers with commendations that are generally made out of politeness and are mainly responsible for the proliferation of much worthless poetry and misleading many otherwise able-bodied men from more useful occupations. Tariq Naeem has a lot of poetry in him without doubt but we leave it to him to believe if he is the authentic voice of this century or a new experience altogether that all new poets with contacts are told at book launchings. Companionable though he is and one shares with him the uncertainties of this age and its peculiar melancholy. We have lines here that bristle with angst and pulsate in the ashen heat of helplessness. He isn’t much of a romantic not either a revolutionary. A man of faith like all of us, he is drifting in painted prairies.
