Bernard M Jackson, England

In the temple of my heart’s city

Someone rings the bell

Kindles a lamp

Then gradually

Disappears down the back steps

                                                     (Heart’s city)

In variant worlds of extensive change and often alarming consequence, it is so heartening to be able to share in the realization that the true passion and characteristic sensitivities of genuine human emotion very much remain the constant beacons of hope and reassurance to a society in the making. The concept of human love in the classical world of art, music and literature, collectively, is widely regarded as the very pinnacle in terms of creative endeavour and ultimate achievement.

The entire world loves a lover, so the saying goes, and love poetry has apparently flourished from well before the annals of first recorded time. Having previously been honoured to be invited to review SOME MOMENTS OF LOVE, an impassioned collection of poems by Hamza Hassan Sheikh, a gifted Romantic poet from Pakistan, it is with great pleasure that his second published collection has now come my way for due appraisal.

The title of this work may, to the uninitiated, seem a trifle puzzling, but when one clearly understands that in the same way that various familiar artifacts, within a museum, are necessarily displayed to keep alive our pageant of history, so too a lover, parted from the previously adored one who had been the absolute light of his life, must find it consoling and expedient to arrange memories and significant vignettes in such a way that their respective recollection might never fade:

Though you are dead

And gone from my sight

Yet your figure

Is part of my soul!

                                    (To See You Again)

Death imagery certainly plays its part in the poetry of love, for when one loses one’s life-partner, whether to the death of that person, to the arms of another or even to eventual total separation, it is that same intensity of grief that surviving partner must endure.

Listen! My heart’s slogan

Abide in it like a star

And give me salvation

From this solitude.

                                      (Solitude)

Hamza Hassan Sheikh has previously experienced many of the pitfalls of a doomed romance, but has raised above all recourse and temptation to indulge in self-pity, to transpose his combined feelings of hope, passion, anger and lasting affection into beautiful poetry. The English that he undertakes within his verse is strongly suggestive of how it might have been expressed in his own mother tongue.

There are other poems, too, which indicate the poet’s milder form of temperament. Sparrows, for example is a poem of great simplicity, crafted with a strong element of renewed childlike wonderment. The same can be said for his poem, Sunflower, another short poem that clearly reveals the poet’s life long love of the natural world. In his poem, Hawks of the Air, however he uses bird imagery to the full, to exemplify the courage and dedication of a nation’s brave air force pilots. Another endearing facet of Hamza’s poetry is his unabashed recourse to daydreams-which is again, rather child like in its dream like forays. In his poem, The World of Fancy, Hamza drifts into a fanciful world of the imagination in which he becomes one with the mythical naiads of a land beneath the sea. In a shorter poem that employs sea imagery to a much more serious degree, I was impressed by the following words:

My heart is ocean of grief

Your awarded wound

Will disappear in it

Like a gem.

                                                     (Gem)

A superb collection by an up and coming, young poet of international standing, Many will readily identify with faithfully emergent instances of his remembered past experiences, here crystallized into inspired romantic verse. Highly recommended!

Patricia Prime, New Zealand

Museum of Reminiscence is Hamza Hassan Sheikh’s second collection since Some Moments of Love was published.  It is accompanied by a Preface and comments on his first collection of poems.  In his Preface to Museum of Reminiscence, Hamza says a, “Museum of reminiscence keeps a person connected with his past as well as with the memories of nears and dears.”  The collection contains 60 poems, some of which are fairly brief and others that run to two or three pages.

Hamza juxtaposes the longer poems with short pithy pieces, such as “To Some One We Love,” a poem about a person in love, “When they go out of sight / Shining eyes dim.”  In the titles of these poems, many of them one-word titles, the poet expresses a gamut of emotions from abhorrence, sorrows, peace, solitude, to a sad tree.  For example, in “Abhorrence” the persona is self-effacing, which makes the juxtaposition of a voice which feels hatred for another with the poem “Eyes,” where misunderstanding leads to sadness, all the more striking, urgent and dramatic.

Thus Hamza enables his readers to eavesdrop on figures that he says “behave rudely, cruelly and with much hatred and abhorrence.  But yet you tolerate all this atrocity and abhorrence and love them.”  (Preface).

For Hamza:

            Her face is like an open book,

            You understand all, once you look.

            Her face was reddish with love’s shame,

            Just like as a flaring red flame.

                                                (“Quatrain”)

It is an enlightening experience to read a young man’s lyrical love poems.  “Envoy of My Happiness,” a poem in rhyming couplets, expresses the heartfelt longing to find the perfect woman which whom to share his pain:

            The envoy of joys didn’t come here,

            For whom I strayed here and there.

            Just looking for you everywhere,

            Seeking for you O! My sweet dear.

In Museum of Reminiscence, Hamza manifests his strong sense of self-hood and what it means to explore love and rejection.  In “To See You Again,” Hamza’s persona dreams of a lost loved one:

            Though you are dead

            And gone from my sight

            Yet your figure

            Is part of my soul.

Hamza relates to one of poetry’s oldest functions, which for him is to “become the sculptor and sculpture the idols of stones in the glooms of night.”  (Preface).  Poetry, for him is not just to memorialize faces and people, but to translate his longings so that they can be an archive in itself but also as a measuring stick for future change.

“Hawks of Air,” “Sun Flower” and “Sparrows” concentrate on nature.  The hawks are “courageous, full of dare,” the sun flower “rotates” all day to watch the face of the sun, while sparrows make a neat house “To lay eggs / And build up their race.”  The poet uses these natural phenomena as a metaphor for his own desires for fulfillment.

Hamza uses a romanticized style that might in its diction, rhythm, subject matter and phonological quality; remind one of the Shakespearean sonnets.  However, Hamza admits the impossibility of the poet’s task to capture the ideal.  In his poem “Ideal”, the persona’s effort to capture the ideal woman and to define her beauty is nothing without a glance from her:

            What to talk about eye-brow or eye-lash,

            And without whose glance the world seems a trash.

            I croon madrigal and then I compose,

            Either on her forehead or of keen nose.

“Peace” defines the word as soothing the heart:

            Peace

            A word when expressed

            From the tongue

            It soothes up the heart.

“Secret of Moments” is divided into four parts and is a metaphor for the poet’s themes of his heart being conquered, then broken by harsh words, becoming lonely and seeing the loved one deserted by “fair weather friends.”  Yet, for all that that, he will be there “Near your dying” when, at last,

            You will come to know

            how sweet was my heart?

            For you

Reading these poems with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it feels like to be you, in love, rejected and scorned.  In the title poem, “Museum of Reminiscence,” Hamza combines a fairytale quality (“I love a statuesque / Who dominated over my senses”) with a disconcerting atmosphere produced by the choking of his feelings and the assassination of his passion.  However, this beauty he has conjured up in his remembrance is going to remain a figment of his memory:

            But I have decked one more

            Unforgettable statue

            In museum of reminiscence.

Central to Hamza’s collection is the poem “Life,” a sequence that focuses n the various meanings of life.  In various stanza forms, he tells his story.  The following stanzas may serve as an example:

            Life

            Life is a desert

            With bushes, thorns

            And sharp stones.

            Like warm sand

            Where legs tremble

            Feet bleed

            And man falls

            On each step.

            Like a flower

            Withers after blossoming.

Poems now follow which deal with everyday life:  “Wheels” is a sad poem about a boy’s death beneath a motor car “Whom his smooth hands / Washed daily.”  “Butterfly” tells of a “gorgeous butterfly” - one minute there and the next piercing many more flowers “With her beauty’s magic.”  Perhaps this too is a metaphor for the way in which some women flit from one man to another?  “The River Bank” is a rhyming poem in couplets, about the way in which the sudden waves disperse the thoughts of the poet, as he rests by night on the river bank:

            All of sudden, waves splashed with a noise,

            And dispersed my thoughts, now let me rejoice.

            At far away, there embraced earth and sky,

            O! Lord from your nature who can deny.

In “Story of a Night,” we see the poet

            Dipping the pencil

            Of my dry lips

            In an ink of affection

            I drew a love’s landscape

            On the sheet

            Of her face.

In “Valentine’s Day” the poet is alone, watching other lovers.  His last valentine has withered and betrayed him, while he was “just an idol / Heedless of love.””Lost Love” and “Wait for my Beloved” are heart-rending poems of rejection, waiting and dreaming of the beloved.

In the final pessimistic poem “Future Generation,” the poet looks into the future, where he sees “humanity danced nakedly / On the reddish land” and he sees and feels a vindictive figure:

My tongue muttered

“Who are you?”

He laughed wildly

And caught my neck

Then replied

“I am your future generation.”

Hamza is a young poet, and the pieces in this new collection point to an enormous potential for language.  Museum of Reminiscence ranges from a number of lengthier pieces that converse as they describe, to shorter works with their quick-silver epiphanies.  Reading this volume, a gallery of emotions, wide in their almost spiritual discernment and intrigue unfolds.  The persona that emerges is mentally alive, alert of eye, quick to enlist sympathy.

Dr. Aju Aravind, Dhanbad

A recollection of broken dreams, memories, and lost love invigorates the imagination of this young poet from Pakistan. Hamza Hassan Sheikh’s Museum of Reminiscence, dedicated to the Indian Poet R.K Singh, lures on love petrified with time and the emotions of a young wannabe poet.  

The collection brings together 60 poems that can be grouped into six segments, and each segment¸ except the last, ends with a Quatrain, that encapsulates the main theme of the poem.  While the first segment of twelve poems, mostly on the theme of passionate love, lust, and despair, begins with a Requiem on the death of his beloved/lover “Who left him alone in a time so brief” (14),  the second segment, consisting of thirteen poems, closes with a Madrigal in a pensive mood. The twelve poems in the third segment recollect the various moments of life and the changing faces of love. In the fourth segment, consisting of nine poems, we see the poet wandering in search of solitude. He echoes: “Shadows are my companion” (76). His “heart soliloquizes/And becomes serene” and he tries to be at peace with himself. The fifth segment, comprising of  five poems, traces the growth of “An infant in cradle” to “The lad into youth” and the maturing of “The youth into man” and “Then man into old man.” This segment also includes a poem on Valentine’s Day, bewailing : “Love which took birth/ Last valentine/ Withered and betrayed” (93). The last segment consisting of four poems expresses dismay at the sight of the ‘Future Generation’ “With long teeth” and where “humanity danced nakedly/On the reddish land.”  This segment also includes a Rondeux poem.

The Quatrains at the end of each segment encapsulate the changing faces of love. In the first quatrain, suggesting optimism and hope, the elated with the newly discovered love, echoes, “Her face is like an open book/ You understand all, once you look” (31). On the other hand, the quatrain at the end of the second segment shows a dejected poet who laments: “Leaves have dropped, autumn has come, / Didn’t she come for a moment or so” (51). The third quatrain shows a precarious poet. The quatrains at the end of the fourth and the fifth segment show a discouraged poet who shelters himself in solitude and reconciles, “But it’s all matter of the bad fate” (99).

The paradox between joys passing away and its results will enlighten the readers of Hassan Sheikh’s Ghazals.  The quatrain/maqta at the end of each segment stirs the poetic emotion and illuminates even the ordinary reader.

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Hassan Sheikh effectively uses couplets to talk of shaking relations.  While moon, and eyes --“Home of emotions” (27) are the recurring images in the first segment, desert, torn and muddy clothes, gloomy grave-yard, and fog instill the poetic emotion in  other parts.

Hamza Hassan Sheikh’s Museum of Reminiscence is a realization that the path of love is full of thorns and difficulties, and recalls the saga of failures, the plight of “The man just defeated by irony of fate” (38). He  also pens a poem on Alexander who loved to conquer the world, and another to Hawks of Air who “dance around death, with a roar,/ Also the guardian of the shore. In yet another  poem,  PEACE  is postulated as an entity that conceives in contented hearts.  Museum of Reminiscence will interest and convey the message that love beckons “every moment” but life has “to pass with sighs and cry” (102), to all sections of the society.

Influenced by contemporary Urdu poetry, Hassan Sheikh experiments and composes Ghazals (in English) with  ash’aar  in which  each couplet is independent of the other.  The poet demonstrates the typical romantic mood and temperament of love poetry, which is understandable, given his young age. The multiple layers of meaning, the social and political milieu that underlie his verses  are not  difficult to comprehend, but his ghazals are easy on the ear and mind. He demonstrates a strong sense of rhythm and  honesty of feeling, despite occasional sense of disappointment:

On that day                                                                            

 For the first time                                                                

  I hated a person                                                                             Who was I.                                                      (26).

Hamza Hassan Sheikh is a strong emerging voice in poetry from Pakistan and we should expect more matured verses from him in days to come. 

Dr. Aju Aravind                                                                                                              

    Assistant Professor,  Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,  Indian School of Mines,  Dhanbad 826004.