With Earth as my Witness

By Tansy Troy

Red River 

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An Urgent Call to save the Earth​

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Jonaki Ray reviews Tansy Troy's collection With Earth As my Witness

Tansy Troy’s poems in her latest collection, With Earth as my Witness, are like a lover’s lost kiss in the way they typify the ephemeral moments of loss, grief, the changes happening in our inner and outer lives, the strength in spirituality to cope with these, and the destruction of the natural world around around us. The range of the poems includes snapshots of lives in the mountains, sutras based on spirituality and experiences, as well as eco-poetry based on climate crisis, and an afterword based on the UN declaration of Human Rights.

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Each poem picks those experiences unique to us, yet manages to show those facets that are universal. The poem, Abe Le: A Tribute, about the author’s mother-in-law is one for instance, where the wheel of life and the changes in the environment as one goes through that cycle are interleaved: “No need to light a thousand butter lamps,/ I am already lit!/ Passed so swiftly from this shell,/ hard-worked until my bones and mind were numb and outworn…She shakes her hard and matter-of-factly tells me/ how that cannot be./ There are no horses any more./ No horses any more.” This universality of experience—where everything happens to one of us is actually happening to each of us and with Earth as witness is described vividly in Mother Tree: “…Do not say this cannot be/when it’s happening to you/ when it’s happening to us/when it’s happening to me—/ and if you really cannot see, just go ask the Mother Tree.”

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Talking about the various themes in her work, Troy mentioned in an email discussion, “As a painter, I am hugely susceptible to colour, light, shade, curious objects, characters and compositions. Philosophically, I guess I am somewhat pluralistic, in as much as I am very interested in different faiths and the paths which lead to them.  Emotional responses to events that happen along the path is a poet’s bread-and-butter, the daily fare that goads us into poetic action!  And spiritually?  Yes, I like writing about the spirit of things.  I would say I am increasingly conscious of the need to offer a voice to the voiceless, so the ‘eco-poetry’ is a response to environmental deterioration and degradation which surrounds us all with horrifying velocity.  In With Earth, I was conscious of bearing witness at a time when cultural amnesia is blindfolding us on this hurtle through what could well be our last century on the planet.” 

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Troy added that the collection even changed trajectory in the process of creation, “My initial idea had been to take the reader on a sort of Odysseus-ian journey from exterior to interior, following my own navigations of India since I’ve lived here. As time went on, the collection became so much less about me and so much more about the Earth.”

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The book is divided into parts, or segments as the author calls them, each with interesting titles, a list of words as subtitles, and thought-provoking epigraphs. For instance, the Navigating the Polis segment has the words: Pavement, Steel, Concrete, Sweepings, Rag as the subtitle; while the last part, Ambrose for Last Days in the Worlds has Space, Carbon, Antimatter. How did the author come up with these? As Troy explained, “I was keen to identify the material component parts that make up the environments described within each segment.  I would suddenly realise that ‘bone’ could be found in the landscape ‘Under the Bodhi Tree’, or ‘sweepings’ and ‘rag’ were part of the navigated ‘Polis’, so these sort of footnotes got included along with the segment titles.  The epigraphs were from favourite books and poems, scrawled on various scraps in my notes, promised to be given space.”

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One of the most striking elements of the collection is the imagistic nature of the poems. This is particularly strong in poems that describe both, personal elements as well as the landscape or environment around. Consider the lines from the poem Home Stretch: “Much travelled road/poinsettia red, glows jacaranda now;/ third eye shield,/ reflecting storm cloud,/ some sorrow left to weep./ When we arrive,/ an abandonment of kitten,/ tangle of rose,/ hundred thousand year of tree./ Fields of clover, buttercups, too lavish and dense to scythe.”

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Zooming into a very different arena yet again with striking images are the poems based on “city life”. The poem, Khan Market ballads, a part of the segment, Navigating the Polis, focuses on the prosaic but often less voiced behind-the-scene of the famous market: “‘Ripe!’ cries the Strawberry man, ‘Ripe, come buy!’/through the boutiques arcades where bright velvets sigh,/ and the single-legged sock seller plies his wares,/ while the maker of new keys jangles and glares./...Khan Market lingers, a lover’s lost kiss.” Yet, these poems are not engaging only with the superficiality of city lives, but also with the small moments of originality and humanity, which only someone with a keen eye can observe. Troy explicates, “Khan Market, for all its over-the-top chi-chi vibe, is beyond Bond Street outrageous boutiques and has its absolutely authentic corners.  There’s the best shoe-mender known to humankind who sits, summer and winter, on the pavement near the Mandir, for example.”

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It is this instinct for memorializing and witnessing, yet remaining resilient about what is around us that unites the starkly different segments, Under the Bodhi Tree: Petal, Bone, Stone, and Leaf at the beginning and the final one, Ambrosia for Last Days in the World: Space, Carbon, Antimatter. Consider the lines from Peepul Sutra, at the start of the collection that describe the common-ness between us and everything and everyone else: “…Our collective whisper transcends/ individual voice, recognising in our multitude/ a canopy of multiple presents, continued ad infinitum….”. And in Signs to Observe (on a Walk Around College Grounds) towards the end: “…continue walking instead of doing/ what you feel should be done,/ lying down on the poor scarred earth,/ giving up completely./ Scent on the air arrests;/ tough, resilient Frangipani/ encouragement at last,/ Keep going on this long salt march, she says. There may be some good remaining.”

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It is this hope that there is good between us, that we will re-learn how to rewild and understand that there is really no distinction between our rights and the rights of the Earth that strikes a note of defiance and resilience in the final section, Afterword,  Troy writes, “Maybe a book of poems cannot really change the world. But it can be witness in the way we can all bear witness, as the Earth does, every moment...”.

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This book can indeed be called a clarion call to take urgent action to save the Earth, and one could even argue, the world, despite the times we live in.