The River as Passant: A Review of Jaydeep Sarangi’s From Dulung to Beas: Flow of the Soul

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Authorspress, 2020. ISBN (Paperback) 978-81-7273-646-0. Pp 83 | Price  295

Basudhara Roy

Assistant Professor of English, Karim City College, affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Email: basudhara.roy@gmail.com

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.19

“Poetry,” writes bell hooks (2012, p. 7), “is a useful place for lamentation…poems are a place where we can cry out.” Few observations, indeed, could be closer to the truth. What, however, repeatedly claims my attention in hook’s statement, is the phrase constituting her first four words here, ‘Poetry is a useful place’. As the world comes rather alarmingly together, thanks to networking and the pandemic, leading to a radical reconceptualization of both spatiality and temporality, and as the ethics and norms of distancing annihilate distinctions between the local and the global, much to the chagrin of the local, I find my realization and awareness of poetry as place increasingly heightened. The more one ponders over it, one realizes that poetry is not simply search, journey or exploration but also, equally and significantly, anchorage. It is a place from which one looks at the world, negotiates and relates, but simply and most overwhelmingly, poetry is a place to be. As I read again and again through Jaydeep Sarangi’s ninth collection of poems From Dulung to Beas: Flow of the Soul, the conviction of poetry as place becomes unassailable. Full-Text PDF>>