Author: D C Chambial
ISBN: 9789387651234
Year: 2018
Language: English
Binding: Softcover
Price: ₹ 251.00
Reviewed by Prof. Nandini Sahu
Nandini Sahu |
For decades, poetry therapy has been ceremoniously
acknowledged as a cherished form of interpreter and registrar of human maladies,
and it has been proven actual with a varied group of clients. This poetry
collection, Songs of Sonority and Hope,
by D C Chambial, a pioneer among the contemporary poets, apprises the
integrated poetry therapy practice model with a host of existing issues, and
some of the poems sound like performance poetry. This collection is a truly precious
source for any thoughtful practitioner of poetry, a mentor, or researcher involved
with poetry therapy, bibliotherapy, writing remedial poetry, or the broader
area of creative/expressive skills therapies as a whole.
In this collection, Songs of Sonority and
Hope: A Collection of Poems: 2010-2017, I can confidently say, D C Chambial is a poet therapist with
profound awareness of sonority and colour, yet also coherence and
energy, and imbued with a heartfelt affinity for rhyme, rhythm, metre and music.
It’s a poetry book of contentment, celebration, hope, happiness and success:
TRUE HAPPINESS
True
happiness lies here on this Earth
when
we have time to look around and care.
The
Nature too seemed all the more happy:
She
blessed them all with a mellow mizzle,
hot
after-noon, by beach, the place asizzle. (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,73)
D
C Chambial offers ample scope of understanding life as his poems bring
co-relation and connectedness between ecology and humanism. Very few poets are
better than Chambial in dealing with human character. In this sense, he is not
only diligent but also the finest humanist. His personae occupy a perfect world,
metaphorically more often, and ecology around themselves. It is rather exciting
and interesting the way he leads to them to usher in their environment to
liberate themselves as it is his essentialism to be eroded against social
inequality, injustice, and discrimination between gender, race, age, sex and
class-- of cross cultural and cross historical nature. Basically, his poems are
the songs of peace and harmony, like the title poem itself:
SONG OF SONORITY AND HOPE
When
exploitation and coercion
cross
the bounds of humane humanity,
it
becomes must for Nature
to
restore the natural justice.
The
wind turns into gale. The fire – wild fire
when
they join hands and move in the valleys,
on
the hills and the mountains. There dances
devastation.
Revolutions result
from
ruins of mansions great and powers high.
The
grass soaked in blood stirs from slumber;
picks
up the reed and sings with wind’s fury
A
new song of sonority and hope. (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,147)
Like
any other ecofeminist, he often stands against patriarchal dominance,
militarism and capitalism. Moreover, his poetic personae widen the scope of
ecofeminism with its growing attitude from time to time to dismantle binary
oppositions between man/women, heaven/earth, mind/body, human/non-human,
spirit/matter, culture/nature, white/non-white etc as they are empowered by the
supremacy of his powerful poems, expanding ecofeminist rule to authenticate
their stance as advocates of deep ecology. They raise voice against the subjugation
of the marginal and nature and oppression by power. Let me quote a few poems
from the collection in this context:
AN ESCAPADE
During
rains and school vacations, all went
in
procession with herds to the village green;
all
minds fresh and preen. Hey! Ho! All cried
in
harmony as one. They cut the grass,
spun,
and twined the single rope for Savana-swing,
apace
to make it doubly strong.
Beamed
their faces after the task done,
as
though the heaven was won. (Songs
of Sonority and Hope, 20)
RADISHES AND TURNIPS
Soft
is what one needs:
Soft
sentiments, soft moments,
Soft
touches and, of course,
Soft
relations
To
avoid hurts and bruises
For
copious growth
Of
shout relations and roots. (Songs
of Sonority and Hope ,23)
This
collection subtly intends to consider different kinds of connections between
human and nature/ecology/environment, objecting proto-typical patriarchal
system that the characters never dissociated from time and order. More
obviously, there appears the conceptual connection -- a value hierarchy, a
dualism-- the binary oppositions that both male and female characters can be
studied through ‘isms’ such as sexism, racism and classism,etc. A few poems
substantiate the above statements:
SO GOES THE WORLD
Sonnet
So
goes the world with her artless mean na├пve,
Siphon
blood out of ones, who direly crave. (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,42)
MAN PREFERS MATTER
God
made Man, they say, in His own image;
Man
rebelled, strayed away for doing damage. (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,43)
THIS LASCIVIOUS WORLD
All
human milk is dried in human heart
That
can balm the wounds of misused mortals
To
give them hope, a puff of balmy breeze,
To
take them out to soothing sun from freeze.
They
too long to stand, enter the portals
With
warm blood in veins, song divine in heart. (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,44)
LIVE WITH WINNING THUNDER
True,
“Life is a nine day’s wonder”,
Live
it, live with winning thunder! (Songs of Sonority and Hope ,59)
The
songs in this collection resonate with
deep, pleasant sounds of music, euphony, harmony, sonority and hope. The
poems are soothing, having the ability to touch the core.
Prof. Nandini Sahu, Director,
School of Foreign Languages and Professor of English, IGNOU, New Delhi, India,
is an established Indian English poet, creative writer, theorist and
folklorist. She is the author/editor of thirteen books;has been widely
published in India, U.S.A., U.K.,Africa and Pakistan.Dr.Sahu is a triple gold
medalist in English literature, the award winner of All India Poetry Contest
and Shiksha Rattan Purashkar.
She is the Chief Editor and Founder Editor of two bi-annual refereed journals, Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature and
Language (IJLL) and Panorama Literaria.
Her areas of research interest cover New Literatures,
Critical Theory, Folklore and Culture Studies, Children’s Literature, American
Literature.
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