In a TV-oriented world where we are typically only stimulated by sight and sound, MK Ajay’s collection of poems, Sweetness of Salt, is a true feast for the senses. Whereas many poets attempt to grab their readers with clever imagery, Ajay reels you in with a remote warmth calling / through visceral aches (“Leaves”) and holds you in this sensory realm waiting for salt to disclose its vast sweetness (“Dialogue”).
Ajay lives with his family in Kuala Lumpur, India, and even his poems of internal reflection can’t help but reference environments indigenous to his country. In “Dialogue,” a visit to the ocean seems at once both portentous and welcoming:
Our daughter imitating
cry of gulls.
Salty-lipped,
burden of breeze
on our shoulders,
we see the sun
clawing into this water’s skin.
A dolphin’s grey smoothness
lollipops into a crimson sky
and draws playful
orbits of mammalian life.
We sense each other
imagine depths
of salt-spray and
spliced sunlight.
History is a recurring theme throughout Ajay’s collection – his ancestors’ as well as his country’s past. “Houses,” perhaps the longest poem in the book, winds its way around the many places Ajay has lived – a tourist revisiting his former homes and marveling at the changes. But much of it is a bitter homecoming as he writes There are no shadows here / that take me into their arms. Memory is a conflicted space sometimes and Ajay pulls no punches as he observes a pond he inherited from his grandfather and realizes it seemed greener to me / a few seas away.
Ajay’s poems convey emotions impacted – evoked, even – by their surroundings; images return later in a poem transformed by the mental processes the poet is working through. “Drift Song” is a good example of this mind wending its way through a gambit of emotions sparked by broken memories, transforming the surrounding landscape in the process:
The wind that caught me
by surprise at leaf’s brightest hour
when crows rummaged the sky for scent of monsoons
is a name freed from its body –
a spirit presiding over this wetness.
Frailties, remembered again
as I stepped into the wind’s ghostly flight
have become sprouts of garba grass
and white madness on jasmine plants.
This is the pedestal from which
we survey our world of broken memories,
and aromas that bind me to my grandparents.
And the raindrops – how they slide through red tiles
to the waiting floor below, creating puddles
of bewilderment, teasing coldness.
This time I caught the wind by surprise
waiting for it at this afternoon’s only spot
of warmth beside the well.
This, when at the leaf’s brightest hour
a chrysalis conquered its apprehensions
as crows rummaged the sky for monsoons.
Sweetness of Salt, by MK Ajay, stirs the five senses while engaging the sixth sense that pulls everything together and binds it with memory and history.
85 pp.
