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Ellipsis
‘Ellipsis’ : omission of the implied word. A metaphor for a flight: the flight of a word from a sentence that may bind it to too fixed a meaning, perhaps, or even an escape from the imperialization of a singular possibility, identity, purpose. A thinking, willing flight, that is: active, modern, an act of free will. In her first book of poetry, Laksmi Pamuntjak finds a space, a private sanctuary, where language can just freely be, accountable to nothing and noone, and that what she writes is not something to define. Rather, it bids her to the space of things. To the storeroom of each memory that comes to mind -- a half-forgotten phrase, the edges and elbows of a song, scraps of urban legend, a mythological creature, an immediate visual experience, a sound that reverberates through a landscape -- witnesses all that we do not live in a vacuum, that we do not only consist of one side, and that there is something there that multiplies our voices into other places. It is when we hear that echo that we know there is a ‘meaning’ or a value far greater than ‘comprehension.’ And thus Laksmi speaks about love in all its guises and permutations, travel to faraway places, a mother’s prayers, food and sex, mythology and music, Sylvia Plath. Some of the poems in Ellipsis were introduced for the first time at the Singapore Writers Festival, August 2005.
From the miniaturized Hieronymus Bosch ‘The Tree Man’ on the book’s cover, Ellipsis takes us on a journey across continents, through the brush of forest leaves, the pungent aroma of diesel fumes, the dank, entangled limbs of lovers, the intimate ferocity of motherhood, the blinding, white concrete of cityscapes-without-end, all inspissated with a “lea of silences”. Through this substrate of “human dough”
and Bourbon, from ‘Shanghai Rising’ to ‘Dawn’s
Antigone’, surely “neither sin nor Satan” could have
conceived such a box of song and text. In both the verse poetry and the
prose poetry (or ‘poetic prose’ - but such divisions in any
case are arbitrary), the writing is diamond-cut yet visceral, suffused
with intellect yet shamanic. Pamuntjak is ‘A Composer Driving in
the Rain’, a “peddler” of wondrous tangents, cracked
vessels, “wounds without poultice”. In Ellipsis,
there are no masks, no mirrors, just truth, caught momentarily like a
silhouette, like “ashes falling before [our] eyes”. Pamuntjak’s
poetic ear is so attuned, her eye so meticulous, her fingers so deft that
at times, sometimes by passion, sometimes by mere nuance, like a rasik
the reader is transfigured. And so, we move through the rational, the
intuitive, the spiritual, to the beyond…
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Ellipsis
contains some of the freshest, most sensual poems I have ever read. Laksmi
Pamuntjak splays the mess and fragility, the embarrassing physicality,
of human relationships. But she spans a far broader canvas - politics,
religion, the touch and smell of many lands - and perhaps most importantly
for an artist, with an unresolved aesthetic intensity, immanent in every
one of her texts is the question, why?