A SLICE of childhood spent in the 1940s and 1950s. Which thereafter ceased to be. Acclaimed Marathi poet, Pravin Davne, agrees. "We live in times when we've lost such grandmas and grandchildren," he rues. And gone with them is our capacity to appreciate poetry naturally, he says.

Yet the genre is far from dying. Thanks to a clever ploy poets began staging poetry. Devout poetry fans crowd poetry reading sessions. But the likes of Pune-based Chandrakant Kale and Anand Modak went a step further. They breathed life into poetry as they thoughtfully merged two genres poetry with theatre. The result was Sajanvela.Based on select 14 poems by popular Marathi poet Manik Godghate (known by his pen name, Grace), it is a theatrical stage performance.

When director Kale and music director Modak, picked up Grace, they banked on the confidence of having staged under the aegis of Shabdavedh two other `poetry performances', Amrutgatha in 1988 and Preetrang in 1992. They didn't wish to turn the show into a lecture on Marathi literature. "Too much explanation makes even the finest poetry sound mundane," says Kale.

The duo's `poetry performance' is a golden mean sought between a poetry reading session and an outright musical. "Poems will be sung and the poet's thoughts, in prose, will connect his poems," says Kale. This prose will provide the ground for theatre.

Kale first read Grace in 1992 when his poems were incorporated in Preetrang. While he was impressed by Grace's style, Modak found his imagery arresting. The theatre person in Kale at once detected the dramatic potential of Grace's words and verse. "His, is atremendously theatrical language," he says, in appreciation of the poet's work.

The fact that critics often complain about the incomprehensible element in Grace's poetry, doesn't seem to bother Kale and Modak. The latter terms it as the poems' "hypnotic power". "It's the poems' mystic quality not incomprehensibility," says the former, vehemently, "Not everyone understands Picasso or Van Gogh, but it doesn't mean you don't exhibit them."

So, Shabdavedh is out to do exactly that present the difficult in an easy-to-understand way. The music has been composed in easy meters. "Orchestration has been kept to a minimum level. We have used only the Spanish guitar, a tabla and an organ," says Modak. Despite the fact that it's going to be a stage performance, the team insists that poetry is the spine of the show. They have made it simple for people to understand.But it hasn't been such an easy task for the team. Selecting just 14 poems was a problem and composing them was even more difficult. Here they admit thatstaging Grace's poetry was a challenge. It took Modak two-and-a-half months to compose music for the poems. "I felt like I had recovered from typhoid after I completed the music," he says. Kale had to rehearse for over two months with other singers Mukund Phansalkar and Madhuri Purandare besides himself. And the guiding force behind all the efforts was the conviction that sincere efforts are always appreciated.

Both, Kale and Modak know that their's is an odd job markedly different from the stage shows of popular poetry. But they are confident about their product. Modak strikes a stunning analogy. "There's bound to be a difference between Raj Kapoor's ever so successful films and those by Satyajit Ray. That doesn't mean all would make films like Kapoor did," he says.On April 11, 1998 at 7.00 pm and at 6.30 pm on April 12 at the Experimental Theatre, NCPA.