Reviewed by Jaydeep Sarangi
Thirty-five well
researched reviews of Write to Me: Essays on Indian Poetry in English
take us to the work(s) of the poets reviewed, faithfully and along with this
they do something amazing. Collectively, they justify the strength and richness
that lie at the heart of the current corpus of Indian Poetry in
English. Write to Me is powerful responses to some important
volumes of verse, but taken together the reviews serve as a brilliant
introduction to the rich diversity of today’s Indian Poetry in English written
from different backgrounds. Noted Wollongong (New South Wales) based
critic Paul Sharrad asserts, “I would want Roy as my
reviewer.” A curator of Hearth Within, an important online poetry
platform, the reviewer is a committed artist who thinks poetry constitutes a
record, a document, a witness, a thread of happenings and a timeless corpus.
Her introduction to the book is a rare gift for the readers where she earnestly
says, “Poetry in India and Indian Poetry in English is, currently, going
through one of its healthiest and happiest phases.” Indian poetry in English is
globally visible and intrepid for all spheres of social/ literary
appropriation. Indigenous resources of multicultural India are the vital energy
for the uniqueness of IPE. IPE has that strength that can never bore readers
from different backgrounds. The reviewer explores all possible parameters of
Indian knowledge banks taking texts from different perspectives and analyzing them
critically and contextually.
The review anthology begins with Bhanu Kapil’s wonderful
collection How to Wash a Heart. Bhanu Kapil is a British American
poet of Indian heritage. The review is an attempt to find out an interface among
cultures and contexts. The speaker in this collection, it is highlighted, is a
champion artist, who brings out the fabrics of traditions and modernity at
multiple levels. The reviewer examines the question of identity of an immigrant
poet through a set of tropes. The immigrant experience is more layered in this
collection as the interaction of three personal racial histories of the three
women. Like all diaspora critics the reviewer tries to figure out “What is a home?”
Her arguments are sharp and intense. Not all poetry collections have an axe to
grind, to hypnotize the readers.
A prominent Bengali poet
Shyamal Kumar Pramanik’s The Untouchable & Other Poems is
a translation from his Bengali poems. Pramanik speaks for the Dalits
characterized by subversions, protest, defiance, resilience and emancipation.
The fifty poems that comprise The Untouchable & Other Poems are
seminal markers for social change. The sensitive reviewer probes deep into the
poems and highlights the poet’s strong self-awareness to his social and
personal dignity and commitment towards a casteless society. The readers are startled
in these poems by a language that resists both aesthetically and functionally.
The maestro is at her critical best when she quotes and examines, “Awake, awake
O world’s primitive man.” Only a sensitive reviewer can do it with ease.
One of the champion poets from the North East Robin Ngangom’s My
Invented Land is a collection of poems which is a faithful exploration
of desires and the heart’s multi-layered longings for peace, hope, justice,
cultural/political understanding and human credence. The review shows how the
seasoned poet crafts an entourage of life’s daily resilience to fight back from
every upset. For him poetry is therapeutic. Self, land and poetry constitute a
thematic confluence:
“It is never too late to
come home.
But I must first find a
homeland
where I can find
myself(.)” (p. 218)
“Recall, how Kunti had
to
dispossess herself
of a son,
Sita, walk into fire,
despite all the wrists
adorned with sacred
thread.” (p. 128)
Here is a gyre of poems in which life is portrayed firmly and
vividly. Usha Akella’s I Will Not Bear You Sons is an urgent,
demanding tone. The book is divided into two sections, I and We. The reviewer goes deep into a planetary
history of women’s victimization, dispossession and suffering, and the
transcultural and strategic disempowerment of women’s self hoods by the
stereotypes. Basudhara claims the collections as, “an anthem of intersectional
feminist solidarity.” (p.134)
Noted poet-diplomat
Abhay K’s Monsoon: A Poem of Love and Longing is a confluence
of two dominant passions – his love for landscape and his quest for
tracing kinships across cultures and traditions. The poet-reviewer cortically
examines how a single poem of 150 quatrains, Monsoon describes
the journey of the south-west Monsoon from the island of Madagascar across the
Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent to the Himalayas. Kashiana Singh’s Woman by the Door is about
women at the door. The woman, throughout these amazing poems, remains the nerve
centre of the collection and a vital node of consciousness through whom ideas,
ideologies, images and intuitions flow, circulate and sediment into knowledge.
The reviewer considers, “Kashiana’s woman, as the reader will note, is not
one.” (p.163). Her woman represents, for the poet, an ontological collage
for the experience of plural identities; the poet lived in two different lands;
India and US. A perfect
soul-maker Sukrita Paul
Kumar’s Vanishing Words fluidly transacts between poetry and
painting, cross-borrowing ideas. Sukrita’s images are pictorial:
“Numbers don’t matter
Till they become razors
The edges rubbing into
the heart
Sending shards of pain
And the tunnel to death
widening
for the rising numbers
to enter.” (p. 186)
All reviews and the individual collections demand our careful attention. Many poets are professors. Among many myriad reviews we may mention, Anita Nahal’s What’s Wrong With Us Kali Women? GJV Prasad’s This World of Mine: Selected Poems, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca’s Light of The Sabbath: Poems about Memories and the Sacredness of Light, Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Unbound: New and Selected Poems (1996-2021), Vinita Agrawal’s The Natural Language of Grief, Sanket Mhatre’s A City Full of Sirens, Malashri Lal’s Mandalas of Time. Each of these reviews is a call from within. These individual poetry collections are amazingly remarkable for their obsession with Indian mythical knowledge systems, the authentic emotional inflections, the loaded metaphors/idioms, and the oscillations across a wide thematic range of living and longing, existence, estrangement, erosion, redemption, hopelessness, pain and forms of beauty and lust.
Let us speak of hands--Black Eagle Books has produced the book elegantly. The book is a face that bears the footprints of India and the world. No doubt that Write to Me will leave us both satiated and wistful for a long time to come. Happy reading!
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