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Book Title: I Want a Poem
Author: Jerry Pinto
CP Surendran
As a poet, Jerry Pinto’s words pick their way along the stations of his cross between two selves. Child Jerry and Priest Pinto. The one is a disconsolate witness to the theatre of tragedy that each family — that surreptitious amphitheatre of our formative griefs — potentially is. Father Pinto is cautionary, even officious. When he takes the upper hand, the poet is saved; the poem suffers.
When the child is behind the camera, the poems work like unforgiving miracles of hurt and guilt, blue, bleak, and gleaming dully without hope, like a day in the monsoon in Mahim, a flyblown, fish smelling, black-swamped suburb of Bombay that Jerry has affectionately appropriated (Jerry of Mahim, he often refers to himself), perhaps to compensate for his series of personal dispossessions when yet very young. The Jerry-side of paradise. And you would be forgiven if you thought for a moment of ‘This Side of Paradise’, a novel by Scott Fitzgerald in which another precocious boy, Amory Blaine, observes the relatively rosier life around him.