Book launch: New poetry collection resonates with modernist feeling

Harris Khalique captures the pain and suffering unique to our time and place.

ISLAMABAD:

There is no Oscar for extras. If you live, live on the screen. If you die, die in the last scene.

Harris Khalique, the poet who wrote the above lines, has once again proved that he lives on the screen. An English and Urdu poet, Khalique on Thursday launched three collections of poems, which were appreciated as a valuable addition to contemporary literature in Pakistan.

They include “Melay Mein”, a compilation of poems in Urdu, “Ishq Ke Taqveem Mein” and a revised and expanded edition of his earlier work in English, “Between You & Your Love”.

“For me, his book “Melay Mein” is easily the first book of modernist poetry in the country,” said Iftikhar Arif, himself an acclaimed Urdu poet, who was at his poetic best in critically appreciating Khalique’s recent work.

“Khalique writes beautifully but it is his ideas that differentiate him from his contemporaries,” said Arif, adding that some of Khalique’s poems from his recent compilations stunned him. He particularly referred to “Safar” (Journey) from “Ishq Ke Taqveem Mein”. “I could not sleep after reading the poem he wrote for his first-born daughter Fayre,” said Iftikhar Arif.

“Harris cannot love for it takes one to give in love and he cannot give but he has surrendered himself for Fayre,” said Arif. As Khalique writes in one of his poems, “Taking It On”, “I never fall in love. I rise to it. I love and love again. Passionately. Faithfully. Faithlessly.”

He has universalised the pain and suffering of an individual rooted in either urban angst or material dispossession in current idiomatic expressions, said Arif.

An English poet herself, Ilona Yusuf said she was impressed by Khalique’s universal approach and his “free from constraining metaphor” style. She read from his poem, For “Anna Akhmatova”.

Some of Khalique’s poems that Arif read out for the audience included “I shall not return the borrowed dust”, “Ishq ke dinon mein” and “Woh alam khuwab ka tha” spoke for the poet’s keen observation and his excellent expression.

According to Arif, the poet inherited his progressive ideas from his father who was considered a staunch Marxist. Since Khalique took up the socialist cause, he has been actively contributing towards social development and human rights in the country. He holds a degree in social development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. So far, Khalique has written eight books of poetry in Urdu and English.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 8^th, 2012.