BOOK REVIEW
“Silent
Days” by Jaydeep Sarangi. Cyberwit, Allahabad, India 2013, ISBN
978-81-8253-396-7, price 200 Rs.
Silent Days by Dr. Jaydeep Sarangi is a
coronet, studded with fifty venerated gems of aesthetically stupendous poems,
at the forehead of Contemporary Indian English poetry. The book was launched by
Professor Dennis Haskell, the Director and reputed poet, Westerly Centre, UWA,
at Australia this year in, the last week of May. The book is dedicated to ‘his
loving daughter’, Titas. Lakshmi Kannan very aptly writes into the foreword
that ‘Jaydeep Sarangi’s poems touch you with a simplicity that is invaluable in
any writer, be he a poet, novelist or a short story writer. For it is important
that a poem should communicate clearly before it sets out to work on our
consciousness the way poems do.’
The boundlessly astonishing consciousness
of the ‘Bard on the Banks of Dulong’, establishes him firmly as a connoisseur
of true beauty of nature and his social milieu, on the pages of Silent Days.
The book is the perfect specimen of his exceptionally creative sensibility and
fecundity. He wishes to ‘stretch the windy wings’ and ‘dance the stormy play/As
the withered leaf.’ Only he could wish to get his wings ‘drenched in the
sky-rending monsoons’. He can successfully ‘arrange the dreams/ Of Indian
Youth/In indigenous ink’. Natural scenes/images, and colour symbols from an
indivisible and mesmerising part of this collection. ‘Red heart’, ‘red soil’,
‘blue mountain’, ‘deep blue’ sky, ‘colourful and bright’ dreams, ‘red and
green’ signals, ‘history with the white’, ‘blue turf ’, ‘white eyes’, ‘green
paradise at the Perth’, glittering ‘red clothes’ of goddess Lakshmi, and ‘green
stories’ after the monsoon of hope’, open the ‘red key to future planning’. ‘Deep
green/Fancies and arguments die hard/On a placid rock’, ‘blue whispers of the
sky’ with all the above mentioned colours make his ‘imagination shine with
colours/Red and Blue’.
Tenth poem in the collection is ‘A Rose
is a Rose’. It reminds its readers the bitter memories of ‘Delhi Gang rape’.
Sarangi has woven the poem with extreme care and guardianship.
Blue
wings of my imagination
Run wild
among my ruined terrace
Of sad
history of women in our country.
His sensitive heart weeps at the agony
of women in India. A father’s deep concern for his loving daughter clearly
peeps through following lines:
I am a
man too
I too
have a darling daughter
And I
fear, the world where she is a flower
The sky
is deep blue today
But, we
never know what follows the next day.
The recurrence of words like ‘silence’ and
‘silent’ reminds me of Life Signs by Jayanta Mahapatra. Poems like ‘Cricket Australia’,
‘Chessmaster and His Moves’ and ‘Out Swinger’ give us a clue to his sporting
nature. The pangs of Dalits find not only a margin or corner but a colossal
space in this collection.
The
margin is unfamiliar like any wild flower
Unseen
and not named yet
Though we
are struggling
In our
long walk to the spotted discourse.
We stay
together.
All the poems of this collection display
new and vibrant shades of his personality. For Mahapatra ‘voices lapse into
silence’ and he too uses silence in a creative manner when he writes ‘out of
silence we look back now at what we do not know’. And for Sarangi silence
becomes the positive catalyst in the chemical process of fabrication of a poem.
Chatting
and mingling
Who knows
when bonding condenses
It grows
unnoticed , Silent is its swell
Like dahi
in a fair bowl
Suddenly
one day
The pen’s
demand awakens-
Poems of
easy bonding seek expressions,
Feelings
of sheer love!
Besides the title poem, my second
favourite poem in this anthology is ‘Bilingual Bard’. The poem has also been
translated into Italian by Antonio Casella. Sarangi never takes ‘an artificial
mask’ in his poems, for him ‘poetry is the window of hope’.
My
language is the free flow of soul
When my
heart is lit up
With
bubbles of anxiety
My life
invites me…
Last poem in this collection entitled as
‘Going to a Holy Place’ continues to sustain the charm of preceding pages. He
crosses ‘the corridors at times and joins the ‘voices of silence/sculpted with
finer touches’. Philosophical perspective enters quietly into the grand palace
of diverse moods. In the concluding poem he writes:
Mind has
its own place to
Lead the
self to the ocean
Where
rivers of differing length mingle
As pure
bath
For men
of several Indian caste and Creed at Varanasi.
Silent Days is a
collection of fifty fascinating frames of fantastic frescoes on the wall of
Contemporary Indian English poetry. His keen eye catches the dreams,
experiences, vision, sentiments, hopes, fears, and chariot of fleeting time
with an unparalleled poetic adroitness. Jaydeep Sarangi’s Silent Days is
undoubtedly a feast for the minds of the readers and critics.
Reviewed by
Dr. Kalyani Dixit
Assistant Professor in English
DAVPG College
Lucknow
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