TALES OF HALF MEN

P C K PREM’S TALES OF HALF MEN 

AND OTHER POEMS

  

P C K PREM’S TALES OF HALF MEN AND OTHER POEMS

Drumbeats hasten a death without loss of time

and the world lives with aliens where half men jump,

and scowl as if in waste

it is a natural life I say.

A horde of voices create a pandemonium

as sub human figures quarrel and cry

in a futile attempt to achieve salvation,

in a fierce sport of reciprocal perfidy.

P C K Prem (p c katoch) is an intellectual associated with Indian cultural ethos. Although Prem -Katoch is a fine novelist in both Hindi and English,he is a poet essentially. Prem is a poet as we speak of Hardy and Lawrence or Shiv K. Kumar in India.  Like many Indian poets such as Arun Kolatkar of “Jejuri” fame, K. B. Rai and Parimala Naik and others, Prem is certainly a great poet as that of Nissim Ezekiel and P. Lal. Yet Prem’s poetry is modern, recording man’s complex experience of life. The present book of Prem’s poetry is called “Tales of Half-Men.” In the modern English poetry context, Pound and Eliot were described as “the Men of 1914.” In India Vijay Tendulkar was called the ‘Angry young writer.” Likewise, these poems of Prem speak of “half-men.” A hallmark of these poems is picturesqueness as we remember of e. e. Cumming’s poetry.  This is how Prem’s poetry is for our times and for those who profess any faith in human culture.  Prem’s poems provide us sense and sensibility. (Dr. Mallikarjun Patil, Karnatak University Dharwad).