Poetry is a type of literary art form which persuades both ideas and emotions. It is important to realise that ideas which are employed in the making of a poem include past experience, reading the Bards and trying newer forms and synthesis. It is not as thought by many who recount poetry as racking the brain for best diction to describe an event or scene, but a flow of feelings encompassing in nature. Dewey’s understanding the purpose of poetry has opened new chapters for he argues that is the continuity of aesthetic experience blended with everyday experience. Let The Night Sing : Poetic Musings by Lopamudra Banerjee is one such collection where a reader can fetch meaning drawn from real life experience aided with unbelievable imagery germinating in her mind which has made this collection a garland of roses emanating unbelievable fragrance of both life and the death. All the five volumes have a well knit and well managed themes aided with rich poetry.
In Forgotten Swan Song hidden and somewhat passive texture of ‘girlhood’ has wished to be noticed. This feminine half voice is heard throughout the book, depicting the ail of the Eve who despite nursing a nightingale in the cage of her breast seems somewhat wanting.
My girlhood days breathe in a little nook Of oblivion, a passing phase,
Similar plight of the Eve has come to fore in A Birthday song: Re-remembered. This forlorn nightingale has become a metaphoric melody narrating an endless saga of a girl whose ‘sensibility’ at least to say is interwoven by the hardships. A cycle of events as mentioned in below mentioned verses have once again caught the attention of the reader. The gyre starts from ‘growing’ which unfortunately like the song of nightingale as a source of the poetic voice has mystified the proceedings. ‘Fumbling’ on the other hand is cohesive force that encourages eagerness for better treatment. Exploring the experience that a grown-up woman alone observes like a tunnel that leads to dazzling sunlight is what has made this collection unique for there are clues where one can authentically claim that the growth of the artists is well marked as verses seem polished with the advancement of age.
Body and soul of a girl growing,
A young woman fumbling,
A grown-up woman, alone, like a tunnel,
Wishes and cakes invading, eager and firm
This fall which is further intensified rather mystified in the poem that follows: Learning to Fall: Lessons from my Girlhood
In a puddle of memories and rain,
I bury my greedy feet.
In its ripples and glittering particles,
My girlhood breaks apart.
The growth of ‘voice’ is well seen in the above verses, there is a momentous courage behind the metamorphosis. The growth is both pathetic and pleasing. ‘Breaking apart’ the expression employed has served the poet in pulling the shutters of ‘greedy feet’ down to let the experience follow her sensitivities like a ripple that seems endlessly chasing a cognizant infinite of mind, serving as a tool of ‘allusion’ for future use.
The voice of nightingale which time and again has emerged as a latent narrator is now matured enough to deliberate upon the changes. These changes seem vital, now the expressions employed are purchased from real life farmhouse where bricks, permanent marks, blue notions, a screaming voice sans penetrations again take us back to that ‘voiceless whirlpool’ where from hiccups of failed conversation has taken a well managed ‘echo’ to sing like a forlorn nightingale imprisoned in her own feathers.
I have nourished all my flames, indelible marks, the coughs
And the rising and falling bile that had made me too, a daughter,
Stacking the bricks, the frozen, blue whims, that had made me one.
My voice screeches, a flat tire, unheard,
The hiccups of failed conversations echo in a happy, painted room.
It’s the Father’s Day, a lump in my throat sings wild.
The situation of imprisoned nightingale is fully explained in the next poem: Forlorn. The curvature of the nightingale is somewhat concave in style for now the lament is exposed which makes a way for the forlorn state. The string of musing otherwise a propaganda mechanism most poets employ to earn the warmest seat in the sympathetic human cage seems at least in this case least concerned. The poet has taken a brave stride to create a valuable space in the minds of readers. Lopamudra Banerjee is not looking to slip through the cervices of blind windows, but has honestly woven a suitable thread to earn regard. In Between This Life and the Other: The Rain, the scream is loud and clear like rain and again the pain which seems a pulsating metaphor employed by Lopamudra Banerjee either to bring at fore the endless feminine agony or at least drawing sketches of silently moving monsters within.
A whisper of sprinkled ashes of pain?
The smoke, a translucent fusion,
Do I drink it whole? The murky waters
Ruminating on the slumber-buried drone of pain.
The first section of book ends with a usual sad note like a nightingale’s lamenting song perching on a bough which is devoid of flowers and the bareness around has once again engaged Lopa’s pen to purchase the imagery from what is well seen and observed by her vivid eye.
Don’t tell me you didn’t find me
Amid the thin film of sunlight
In the dark, arid room.
I waited, customarily,
Glittering, darkening in my prayers.
Volume two __ The Woman: Unwrapped has given us a new and developed ‘voice’. The poem has a powerful drop line revealing that now the nightingale’s voice is copious with ‘spiritual awakening’ for now the expressions belong to ether and the imagery drawn from the ‘ macrocosm’ or at least to say from the doxological dermis depicting ‘ faith’ of a devote.
My sunflower and iris, my ocean and sky
Prostrated at your feet,
My imperfect, tilted world
A selective oblivion.
In Sincerely, Yours the nightingale is openly recounting her affliction. Sitting on the bough of verbal velvet, the melody is saccharine but beneath each crystal lives bitterness making the song a prototype of musing. First person pronoun makes the below mentioned stanza a lane that leads us to farmhouse where the poet dwells in the vicinage of carefree beloved who though lives in the neighbourhood, yet enjoys the tricks of love.
I am the whispering, inaudible song in the wind, the earthy odor of tears trickling, when you rest, lavish and carefree, in your cherished kingdom.
The tone of the same painful voice is carried on in the next poem ____ The Beginning of a Surrender where now the voice of bird has turned our hearts for the cry is oozing like a bleeding heart. The song is well decked up with romance and urges that makes us mortal. The nightingale has moved ahead to turn our attention from the external pathos to internal roaring, thereby calling one and all to listen to the song every human wishes either to sing in privacy or to listen under the open blue azure to connect himself with ‘ Expansion’ of which man is prototype. The verve of human credentials cannot be overrules, the lacerated lover is lamenting the loss of response for now feminine voice under the spell of limitations is explained without sugarcoated adjectives but in raw raspberry form.
My love, don’t you know my charred flesh
longs to make love to you?
Come, plunge in the cauldron
where I am simmering, my vermilion,
My kohl, and my libido, bundled up
in a frothy, bleeding fairytale.
Lopamudra Banerjee like her daring nightingale has once again beautifully open her heart out and laid before us like a red carpet to reach to the podium where she is displaying the secret of her powerful overflow of emotions. Like a true artist she is a devotee of Poetry which has in reciprocity served her to recite her palpitations both sad and joyful. Giving a due regard to the art of writing poetry, her verses are next to be labeled ‘loyal’.
Dear Poetry, have you left me, deserted me for good? So many
scars, so much of venom puked, so many unwritten lines, so
many lumps in the throat, not yet gulped down. My stories are
drowning me in a pitch-dark, bottomless pit every day.
Pangs of childbirth has wonderfully been described through a wailing mother served by unimaginable pain, thrusting upon us the contribution of a mother who under goes such a tyrant treatment owing to which he earns a name ‘ Mother’.
The umbilical cord is bespattered
With blood, mucus and a chill of pain.
The child, first a foreign growth
And then, a mirror image of her own,
A wet, moving mass, is expelled
After spasms rushing out, gushing, in waves….( A Woman I am)
Volume two ends with a well knit poem Ripped, a poem dedicated to younger daughter Sharanya which again celebrates the pain of being a mother who loves to carry a living soul in her womb and feels proud in contributing a ‘ form’ to be a part of the ‘Scheme of things’ . The imagery once again has been picked not from the farmhouse of fancies but from a ‘Real world of Womanhood’. Lopamudra has once again succeeded in highlighting the sacrifice of a mother in more subtle landscape of pain and pressure.
I bite my lips and the salty waters drain down
a labyrinth of pain.
Even if it did hurt from the moment
You were formed,
I embraced its melodies in a wellspring of love,
Wanting the pain glowing
In my body and spirit,
And then it hid away in
Unsung nooks and crevices
Volume third – The Man and The Women depicts age old conflict man and woman. What sensitises the very myopic eye is not sensuality but a severe impression of wishful heart that enshrines a wish list of a lady love to satiate her innate needs. The voice in this section is more demanding and passionate. The growth is well marked by being on the front seat of the vehicle drawn by imaginations to ponder over the needs of a damsel who now is in a position to open her hem before the nature, a big question.
The leaves whisper, as if in an endearing trance,
the sweetest whistles of unfathomable love
rustle in the mountain bends,
the bends where the despairing lover boy
wistfully looks for the last glimpses of his lady love…
Did he find her?
Did he utter his last words to her
in the silken weave of the night’s lovelorn sky?
Did their lips, locked, floating
in the furtive wind, see the
sky bleeding in moon-drops?
The landscape of Skin-to-Skin: The Bed Song is superbly depicted through a proper channel that encourages a lover to melt the wax of her body to light a candle that further intensifies love- making like a bird song reaching to the farthest end of ecstasy leaving the frame to be re-framed in the cage of ‘unification’
I love the way I lose the shore
of our skins, moving imperfectly
through our sounds, without voices.
I love the movement, the suffocation,
the lava stewing at my rib cage.
I am tied around this waddling act,
falling over, making love
like a birdsong, gripping and grouching
unsettling, splattered in the clingy dark
of the room.
In Metamorphosis, the voice has kissed the pinnacles of lofty thoughts by unifying two human needs. The scene is rich in visual and olfactory imagery aided with a well drawn sketch of ‘god and goddess’ who are readily available for the rapture.
The lips locked, tasted like moist moonlight.
The man and his wife, hands clasped,
The awe of picking pearls, and weeds,
Together, the thin whispers, the sacred white walls,
The Indian tea, an act of encoding, storing
and retaining a past, that no longer matters.
The book has reached to logical end with a wonderful and apt theme that marks the end of an inner journey. The journey of the poet is both symbolic and metaphoric. Elements of mythology and personally drawn pictures are well blended in this section. Song of the Road is a real experience during journey where she has fixed a video camera to record the proceedings. The murky flood waters/ The turmeric-stained sunlight are the images that we see as recorded. She has clearly engaged her camera to make us see the things more beautifully through her own third eye.
Adieu, Kolkata has repeatedly personified good bye through a series of experience. Themes like this are seen throughout the book. It is evident that Lopa has like a good potter blended various sample of soil to put the final pot in the belly of hearth which is blistering in her mind throughout the book, making her pottery reveal the secret of making it through free verses.
Time flies exuberance of youth disappears and death brings end to all. This power line of the Bard at least in Let The Night Sing. Death, Ashes and Darkness, the concluded volume dark images, some lamentations, elegiac elements amidst dead bodies and memories but Lopa has finally succeeded and handled the last stanza of the book superbly for she has not lost hope of re-birth. She has firm faith that she will breathe new life into the womb to continue the journey of musing.
The book is delight to read both for beginners and experts for it has covered almost every theme one wishes to write on. I wish the author good luck and pray for her success and hope in future more such books will find a dignified place on our shelves.
REVIEWER
Mushtaq B.Barq can be reached at barqz1@gmail.com
