Ravi Shankar, fondly called RA Sh in English died on Sunday, In Kochi  ,Kerala leaving behind him four poetry collections and an autobiographical work, *Dili ka Kalaakaar Aadmi*. His work "Bullet Train" is an incisive criticism of present-day Indian politics.He has translated several Malayalam poets into English .. A review of his first poetry collection is reproduced as a tribute to the late poet

The sureness with which the poet aims at the readers is unmistakable.He belongs to a new tribe of
verse men who has forsaken the idioms of old and images of the past.He attacks directly evoking new
images from the direct experience and try to make drama out of the bleak reality that our new century is.
Ra Sh is relatively a new poet but the sensibility he evokes is modern and contemporary.
Ra Sh has followed the contemporary writers through translations of their works to Malayalam and is a
remarkable voice in the new world of Indo -Anglian poetry as testified by his new collection Architecture
of Flesh.He has never shied away from the matters of flesh and relatively mundane.His words and
images are coloured by the dark world of the twenty first century,a century which might be the real
crucible of the times to come.
Death,war,rape,disease, degeneration are the themesaround which Ra Sh`s poetry develops.The
architecture of flesh ,the lead poem,is set in the ravaged world where men rape and murder.

The blood is not the thing
Nor the scaring wolf bites
Nor the ripped intestines
It is the gloat in the eyes
That bore into the flesh
......
An autopsy chart,a morticians design
An architecture of flesh built around a void,
A hollow,a frozen core .

It is a view from a forensic surgeon`s table,with no romantic allusions but shocking images of flesh
corrupted and attacked by new age wolves,who attack a fellow being as if it were an animal, a prey in the
forest.It is not for the fragile reader but for a strong mind receptive to the dark world outside him.
The theme resurfaces in the book several times showing the deep scars it has rendered into the mind of
the poet.Here Lies should have been a remarkable love poem if written in another age but to the berets,
the lovers are enemy of the people who could be exploited sexually.We will never know their names or
they would be replicated everyday among the world around us .A Laila Manju of the modern times .

Later he was dumped alive in an unmarked hole
And she was dumped alive by his side
While shoveling earth on them ,a grey beret smirked
"Here lie Radha and Krishnan".

The writer`s obsession with the cruel world ends in images of alarming proportions as in warm is the war

Reporting the list sir
27 warm torsos
261 warm fingers.
46 warm eyeballs...

Peace prevails,sir!
Aye,aye,sir
Warm peace!

It is macabre,straight from the doors of death but the empathy underlining the images are that make it a
poem straight from the heart .
Death might be a romanticized feeling but not in Ra Sh.He sponges images out of its flowery tone
and is happy with grotesque images representing the real world
Only a man went throgh the doors of death would have written like this In the beginning was the
worm:Bond,James Bond,MI15,KGB are players there but finally the worm conquers

Split me,I become two
Am only worm only, crawl only
I worm through your cities sometimes,through your intestines

It is no different in The man who loved her :

The ventilator sang when he saw her
After many eruption tides
Many bird migrations many autumn leaves
The pulse oximeters sang the ecg song...

All my loves
All yours
Will sleep with us.
Even the deadones.
Even those in the seeds

Comparison between the real world and the unreal world of pure sensuousness is not necessary to feel
the images so etched in our mind.

He draws heavily from modern cinema,with which he has a strange obsession.Really it is a huge
repertoire of images and ideas unexplored.In Solaris

we made love,memory on memory
on the shores of that sea
that smelt of lived lives
and decaying souls ...
my tears were a memory when
The sea walls caved in

Whistle is from Japanese director Ozhu .

love whistles through the heart
death whistles through the mind
farewells whistle through the wind
Kisses whistle through the mind

suddenly from the abandoned film shed
comes a whistling train'whose whistle is not a whistle
but a call to war.

The feel from a spectator,dreamer and creator is rolled into one in several of his poems..Silence
occupies the mind as he talks of A silent era when the trees cannot talk

we removed our tongues and ears
and buried them safe
till love and sound could wake them up
bones rattling
in a Talkies

Ra Sh contemplates on words like many of the poets but it is on a different plane

That all words are memories that grow senile.
They pretended to be what they were and are not
Take religious Words,they are a lot
Regimented ,with their noses in the air...

As in the poem he plays with words which brings out the true depth many of the sounds which we call
word.

In the silent woods,and stilled life where organs are on auction and ventilator cry, his love is also not the
ordinary .It is a new found land where vampire girls invite you with their fangs glistening in the dark,like
blood coated crescents .
He has an obsession with the colour blue and it is a world of Shemales,vampires tattoed girls,cannibals
on the prowl.
He has a secret key to open up new vistas in thought which shears through your brain and soul.

Though I have found him very late ,(actually reading his very new poem Bullet Train), I am so happy to
read a different poet, a poet of the era speaking of experiences which has not been so far written with
such incisiveness and feel .Even images of erotica has a shadow of fear which is entwined into the
rhyme and pulse of the poem