BOOK REVIEW: THREE YOUNG POETIC VOICES

REVIEWED BY SANJUKTA DASUPTA

 

THE SILENT WHISPERS
VOICE OF THE MUFFLED MELODIES

Poems by Misna Chanu

ASIN: ‎ B0BGDNRPL2

New Delhi: Authorspress, 2022

Price: 295

 

MOONWALK IN THE AFTERNOON

By Utpal Chakraborty

ISBN: 9788196793296

Kolkata: Penprints, 2024

Rs 250

 

LOVE RELIGION & POLITICS

By Pranab Ghosh

ASIN‏: ‎B0CXTF368K

Kolkata: Virasat Publishers, 2023

Price: Rs 250

 

   In the twenty-first century, Indian poetry in English has made its presence felt with remarkable confidence, creativity, and a zest for breaking free from the traditional boundaries that define poetry as one of the most subtle, sensitive, elusive, and profound literary genres that can be traced back to its roots in the oral tradition. Poets have experimented with content, language, and form and pollinated their poems with a rich aura of allusions and ethnographic details, sometimes opening up new doors of perception. The 21^st-century Indian poets who write in English have dexterously used ethnic signifiers, localized descriptions, regional customs, and culture in their poetry, while they have simultaneously tried to negotiate the non-human ecosystem with the familiar human environment. Poetry is no longer limited to the Wordsworthian axiom that poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. Nor has its priority been about the perfectionism laid down as a maxim by T S Eliot, that poetry is a balanced amalgam of excellent words in excellent arrangement and excellent metre.

  The purpose of poetry can also be about laying bare the axis of reality, poetry being a process of bridging the empirical, the epistemic, and the ontological. Poetry can be descriptive, narrative, reflective, meditative, philosophic, political, and subversive. A poem of a few half lines can unravel the deepest of thoughts, Similar reflections expressed in prose could well become a novel of ideas or an argumentative critical essay.

  The uniqueness of the voice of the poet made the English poet PB Shelley declare that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Perhaps in sync with Shelley’s definition of poetry, Salman Rushdie stated in his inimitable style that, “ a poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” James Joyce too felt that poetry had a power of dissent implied within its aesthetic wordplay. Joyce observed that ‘Poetry, even when most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality’.

Sanjukta Dasgupta

   The Silent Whispers Voice of the Muffled Melodies is a bi-lingual poet, writer, and editor Misna Chanu’s third book of poems. She writes in English and Manipuri. The seventy-five poems in this book of poems are all poems of love, love that has experienced indifference, rejection, outrage, or even disenchantment. Love is one of the most dominant themes in poetry, each poem therefore can be regarded as a love story, some ending in joyous fulfillment of dreams, some experiencing excruciating pain or disappointment, shock and awe, and unbearable experiences of trauma and hurt. So the very first stanza of the first poem in this volume resonates with the whispers that echo in all the poems, that speak of the love of the land, the ravaged nature, the suffering of children, the reaching out to parents, the feeling of indignation and resolution as one of the titles declare with conviction, ‘I Don’t want another Son of God to be  Crucified’.

So in the first poem in her book ‘My Verses Are Stained’ Misna Chanu foregrounds the struggle of survival, the battle that each life has to wage. The six lines of the first verse reverberate with unrelenting violence, as she declares, ‘my verses are stained with/silent cries/Of the unborn poems/Inside the womb of feelings/aborted by the cruelty of time/Before the birth of a dream’. In the poem ‘Poetry’ she describes poetry to be the portrait of unbreakable silence on the canvas of the soul. Mystical, spiritual, illusory, sense perceptions and affect resonate in the lines of her poems of protest and resilience such as ‘Humanity That is Murdered’, ‘Children of the Lost World’, and ‘On the Barren Land of Forbidden Dreams’, among others. Intense monologues of love and longing feature in many of her poems, that touch the heart and moisten the eyes.

 The powerful and sensitive lines of Misna Chanu’s third volume of poems The Silent Whispers will undoubtedly whisper in the minds of the readers for a long time- ‘then sing,/ sing/Until silence consumes all.’

 

    Utpal Chakraborty’s riveting book of poems Moonwalk in the Afternoon is truly an experience in moonwalking, as the motion of the poems both in the wordplay and the precision of ideas, imagination, and reflection in the content, is stepping in time, shuffling backward towards the roots and essence of human existence. The 51 poems in this volume span a wide trajectory, with certain peaks projecting over the rest, in terms of the poet’s concern and engagement with the world within and the world around. The negotiation of the experiential reality with the subjective persona of the poet is explored and represented with adroit use of metaphors, images, allusions, and inferences. There is also an element of irony as well as wry cynicism in the young poet’s desire to experience the trials of geriatrics, as he reflects in the poem ‘ A Desire’ that he is after all in the evolutionary stage of drifting from one childhood to the second. The poem ‘Civilization’ is unabashedly tongue in cheek that creates surreal images of ‘boiled roses and roasted lilies’. Biblical allusions, the last supper, crucifixion, resurrection, a sense of deep soul-searching, and confessional candour permeate a number of the poems such as ‘Love Incarnate’, ‘The Last Supper’, ‘Monochrome’, ‘Revelation’, ‘December 25’ among others. Also, the intriguing use of ‘tamarisk’ a shrub well known in Hebrew culture, suggests the poet’s familiarity with the cultural values and practices of the Old Testament.

Not all the poems in Moonwalk in the Afternoon foreground Biblical allusions or address the artistic splendour of Leonardo da Vinci. There are quite some poems that express contemporary concerns about environmental hazards, climate change, and restitution of nature. Among these poems the relatively longer poem Hey Thunberg stands out as it is addressed to the teenaged climate activist Greta Thunberg. Chakraborty draws the activist’s attention by addressing her as ‘Hey Thunberg/ See how those who had lost the unequal battle/on the bank of the ganges/amidst the fire of the amazon are blooming/into flowers by the roadside’. Moonwalk in the Afternoon is a captivating read as it experiments with content and form, including haiku, senryu, and tercets with commendable skill.

    Love Religion and Politics is Pranab Ghosh’s fourth book of poems. This slim book of 54 poems bears all the evidence of a poet who can use language, images, and ideas in a fine balance, steering clear of excess or blurriness. Each of the poems addresses the poetic persona’s dilemma in negotiating with the varied challenges of the human world. Though love is an overpowering signifier in the poems of Ghosh, the signifier ‘dream’ recurs often in his poems. The world that Ghosh describes is a world of hopeful and hopeless dreams, dreams nurtured and dreams shattered. So Ghosh etches the precarious predicament of dreams as he writes in the poem, ’Outliving the Nightmare!’ that ‘they moved, dream in/Their eyes. The world around with/Reptile eyes observed/Threatening to devour ‘The dream’. Elsewhere the poet thinks of a world of peace as in three half-lines we sum up a non-militaristic, non-violent world of peaceful co-existence- Dream of a place where/No jackboots and bayonets/Keep peace.’ ( Dream 2.0).

Love, Religion, and Politics also include two long prose poems titled ‘After He Lost His Soul Existential Question’ and ‘After he lost his soul 2.0’. These poems are deeply introspective, and self-analytical, gesturing to an existential dilemma and a sense of deep psychological stress that made the poet converse with his inner-self of anxiety. These ten pages that focus on an interiorized soul-searching, is the poet’s unique manner of breaking free from the experiential world around. The process of rising out of depression and renewing one’s commitment to the magic of love and life is graphed as the poet’s way of reclaiming his lost soul. In Ghosh’s poems, the search for love and harmony are pervasive, and the final poem in this volume, ‘The Song’s Over: Remembering Pink Floyd’ engages once again with the postmodern indeterminism that overwhelms the poet’s mind- you look into/The roots of/ Creation and find/A ticking heart/Pumping blood into/The veins of civilization/The destroys itself/Before and after/ Renewals!’

All three books of poems, The Silent Whispers, Moonwalk in the Afternoon, and Love, Religion & Politics prove beyond doubt that Indian poetry in English has undoubtedly claimed a significant space for itself in the domain of 21^st-century Indian literature.

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Setu, February 2025