![]() |
Channels | ![]() |
In Focus |
Cartoons |
Education |
Environment |
Opinion |
Photo Essays |
Columns |
Business |
Random Thoughts |
Our Heritage |
Astrology |
Ayurveda |
Buddhism |
Cinema |
Culture |
Festivals |
Hinduism |
History |
People |
Places |
Sikhism |
Spirituality |
Society & Lifestyle |
Parenting |
Perspective |
Recipes |
Society |
Teens |
Women |
Creative Writings |
Computing |
Humor |
Individuality |
Literary Shelf |
Memoirs |
Quotes |
Stories |
Travelogues |
Workshop |
Book Reviews | Share This Page | |
Songs of Pebbles: A Critical Elucidation |
||
by Bhaskaranand Jha Bhaskar |
![]() |
|
A serious reading of his poetry reveals that his poems are pregnant with intense feeling of love, loving memories, lovely sights and soothing sounds. Elements of love- subjective and objective- are palpable in most of his poems dealing with the beauty of nature and their objects in general and that of his beloved in particular. To begin with, the first two poems – “This Morning” and “That Evening” are antithetical in tone and tenor, and texture. They brilliantly exemplify the contrastive patterns of his poetic thoughts. “This Morning” is a riveting piece of longing and desires sung in the sea of silence while the poem “That Evening” is a romantic reverie, a melancholic note of nostalgia and frustration. The poet laments:
The juxtaposition and contrasts brought forth in above poems point to the similarities among universal emotions and feelings. Hence, even in the gloomy atmosphere of melancholy the poet tends to celebrate the ‘beautiful mistake’ with a sensuous touch. There is a varying intensity of feeling: sometimes he is overjoyed, sometimes engulfed in grief, sometimes, he is lost in reverie and other times he becomes melancholic. So the theme of ‘feeling insecure’ forms the subject matter of a few poems such as “Uncertain’, Not any more”, “ Someday”, One day”, Sometimes”, Never ever” etc. Love and nature are major preoccupations of Asoke Kumar. His evocative poetry rich in diction and images. His love addressed to in the poems is manifold and subject to multiple explications depending on the level of one’s understanding. He expresses his love, its intensity and depth, through objects of nature and its beauty. His expressions have Wordsworthian touch. Let's see the following lines grabbed from the poem "Winter Nights":
Like Wordsworth he, in some poems, sings the song of humanity and creation and in this rendition objects of nature give him a helping hand in proper articulation. Let's see some instances in the poem "Song of Butterflies”:
Nature is captivating to him. He is elated and exalted at the sight of nature's loveliness. He gives an exquisite picture of birds, clouds, landscapes, sea, butterflies etc. with a creative contrast between darkness and lights in his poetry. Songs of silence reverberate in his poetic creativity. Silence and whispers give voice to his thoughts and color his deep feeling running through the lines of romantic reflection on the beauty of not only love but nature also. It can be heard towards the end of the said poem when he reveals:
Asoke Kumar Mitra is not only a poet of love and nature but also a speaking poet of profound silence in which he hatches his poetic nuggets with sincerity. He also listens to ' the music of falling leaves.', ' a song within my heart'. He makes an epigrammatic remark in the poem "Stroke of Words":
He finds manuscripts of his poems 'lost', 'in the eyes of his beloved. He seems to attach more importance to the beauty of nature- the physical aspect of creation. As already pointed out, he believes in 'symphonies of silence.' It is said that 'all deep things are songs'. His poetic feeling is so intense and deep that his utterance turns into a sweet melody just because of its lyrical opulence. To him, his muse is the source of creation of the melody echoing the symphony and harmony- unification of thoughts and feelings. The loving melody rekindles the 'fire of desire' in his heart. The poem “Your Melody" is reflective of his desire:
To him, life has ‘clumsy corridor’ and ‘knows no boundary’ at all. In the poem “Love For Grass Flower”, he further remarks:
A few poems contain his unique perspective on Time and Destiny. As twists and turns of existential reality time is a major preoccupation of the poet. He believes in the power of time and this is the why he uses different metaphors and symbols to show its toll on life. In the poem "Sometimes", he remarks:
Another poem dealing with the theme of time is "Staircase” which presents exquisite imagery of time and beauty of the moon:
Angst and frustration also pervade in his poetry. However, he expresses it in a veiled, sublimated and poetized way. One can feel it in the following lines of poem "Never Ever”:
With the above words of pain he also mentions that 'pretention hurts the most'. Nevertheless, he goes along with affirmation like a poet of celebration of both joy and grief alike and turns suggestive:
In this way we that Asoke Kumar Mitra is evidently brilliant and mesmerizingly very effective in Song of Pebbles in terms of precise expression and presentation of myriad of varying moods with special eye on movements of objects of nature. His writing is notable for a brevity of expression and economy of words. With contours of love and romance with nature, dreams and fantasy etc. his poems have lyrical spontaneity coupled with profound emotions. Barring a few typos and shortcoming with the front or cover page which should have been a bit thicker the book is interesting and riveting in all respects. Like his first book of poems "Savage Wind", the book under analysis “Song of Pebbles” can be termed as the greatest example of objective correlative and the unification of sensibility. Like a seasoned poet he successfully objectifies his inner experiences as the external objects, used in his poetry, transmit, in turn, his internal experiences and moods. |
||
Share This: | ||
05-Oct-2019 | ||
More by : Bhaskaranand Jha Bhaskar | ||
Views: 956 Comments: 0 | ||
| ||
Top | Book Reviews |
|