Dawn Review of Veeni Likhia Din

Mahmood Awan, a young poet, recently published his second book of poems ‘Veeni Likhia Din’ (a day etched on the wrist). Knowing his background a little may help the readers to understand the milieu of his poems. He was born in the Khushab area of the Punjab and is now settled in Dublin, Ireland. He like most expat poets and artists exists at two levels; the real and the imaginative. For a poet uprooted from his ancestral land and planted on a foreign soil what is real now was once imaginative and what is imaginative now was once real. That is not to say that the real and the imaginative do not merge. The merging of real and imaginative is in fact what creates a space pregnant with mysterious disorientation, making the poetic utterance possible.

Mahmood’s poetry is a product of an age of ever increasing intermingling of people through migration, forced or self imposed. In his poetry what is immediate looks intangible and what is removed appears as something tangible. An existential tangle of what is absently present and presently absent is an underlying current of Mahmood’s poems.

“After office hours I come home and see your presence seated in the sofa on my right, in silence/relentless rain outside does not let the evening sink into me/breath refuses to unfold the bygone season and I cry without looking on my right/ dear darling, no one leaves the way you leave or perhaps you do not leave at all but you are not here with me either”. Mahmood though modern in his sensibility does not sound modernistic. Repeated imagery in some of his poems makes them lose their intensity. One gets good vibes that he carries the poetic tradition forward without being traditional.