When Peeradina penned the first word, he perhaps had little idea that he will be busy scribbling for half a century. So much so that when the senior poet was unable to wander outside as much, he began musing on subjects strewn across his home like the fruits decorating his dining table. Him describing the scent of oranges such that ‘an entire orchard has been packed into the single fruit’ arrests your senses as if you yourself are biting into it. Even more stunning are his set of object poems like the “Stapler” ‘borrowed’ for keeps, or the faithful “Shaving Brush” awaiting its fate at fifty. Not to forget the birds flocking over the bird feed in the poet’s backyard. And this sheer simplicity in his authorial choices is what makes him a gem of a poet!

Peeradina’s poems affirm that imagination has the power to accommodate the universe on a sheet of paper. Not only is he able to capture still images but he also excels at freezing transient moments like ‘a silent smile in the very next instant, dissolving, fading . . .’ Likewise he manages to capture the urgency of encountering the beloved in a dream, aware that ‘If I missed you/by a heartbeat, I missed you by a century.’ At the same time, the poet is not unaware of the illusion of the ‘written’ word. He knows that the contractor cannot be trusted to adhere to ‘the agreement in a timely fashion/whether it is verbal or written down.’ But even more ironic is when he personifies death throughout “Close Call”, after all, ‘Death was born to steal the show.’ This is just one instance of such outstanding surprise lines waiting to greet you at the end of his verses, endorsing the poet’s sheer wit. While most of the poems spread across half a page, a few like “To an Old Friend” and “The Daughter’s Lament” are longer monologues with the fragrance of a short story. 

Peeradina’s poems are also a manifestation of other art forms that he engages with as is seen in “Embedded” — an ekphrastic poem on strawberries whose freshness, the poet will ‘preserve like museum exhibits’. What is significant is that he refrains from essentializing the voice of the ‘other’. This is evident when he confesses that his own ‘fingers are strangers to dirt’ unlike those ‘whose limbs have sweated in the fields.’ His older book also preserves poems inspired by paintings making ‘a window on his wall’. “A Rumor of Birds” is an exceptional piece inspired by a book on migratory birds ‘claiming only a bit of earth and infinite sky’.

Nissim Ezekiel’s succinct verse, weighing each word on a scale, is mirrored in Peeradina’s just as it is reflected in the craft of poets who proudly belong to that generation, and rightly so because they were quick to criticise their own work. Peeradina has undoubtedly evolved as a poet and does not shy away from confessing so. When he stumbled across his first published poems that appeared in his college magazine, he was quick to disregard them saying that they were amateurish and embarrassing. Today, even the invisible turns visible as Peeradina makes ‘something out of nothing’ and the impeccably broken stanzas appeal to the eye. His surely is an art of finesse as even the most humdrum subjects turn graceful under his pen. In the poet’s own words — “it is not food alone that satisfies the appetite. It is the devotion/with which you have garnished your offering that satiates the hunger.”