Home

I love the poems in this collection because of an interesting medley of flavours. The preface is beautiful. It vouches for the sanctity of poetry and its all-encompassing nature. All sixty-three poems in "A Letterbox Across Time" are bound by a single thread - an intimate understanding of the ability to love. Just the ability, not necessarily its realisation. And that I feel is the most beautiful thing. Reading the book is a journey worth taking.

While as a graduate student in US, I was exposed to some quality literary magazines and journals, which I read regularly. After returning to India, I was looking for something similar. I could find a handful of these literary journals, among which Ethos Literary Journal is of good quality. They publish both emerging and established writers, therefore one gets both the depth, experience and freshness in the content. If there is a subscription option available, I would definitely subscribe this journal for the rest of my time.

Rituals reminds me of Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass. The poems in the collection gives voice to everyday ordinariness, which is very Indian and masculine (I would say) but at the same time gentle,tender, probing and engaging. To me the poems appear to make rituals out of our daily acts, small and even insignificant on a cosmic level, but needed to negotiate with the infinity that surrounds us. These insignificant acts find expressions in Rituals, with the simplicity and grace they are worthy of.

Reading Calcutta Crows, I felt like walking on an earth that breaks, crumbles on my each footstep. The brokenness remained within each footstep, like an incomprehension that remained within me while I went pages after pages. Just as the sound of earth breaking, brought music to my ears, the verses in Calcutta Crows have same music to them. If one is into meaninglessness of life yet identifies with its music, one must read this chapbook.

Face to face with a poet may not be an extraordinary presentation in the pages of a periodical or little magazine. - Face to face with a poet living through the edges of partisan commitment, ocean of praxis and intra-party scars may perhaps be a subject with difference. A gulf of difference, even if I go for recalling the eminence of Subhash Mukherjee through his Chithir darpone (through mirror of letters), as there has been a lapse of period more than a generation's time. Joydeb Basu whose early demise is as significant as his ordeal of living would certainly be recalled through his best poems and his polemic beyond poetry. Moreover, this well-knit publication from Hawakol - Kobi Joydeb Basu-r mukhomukhi (Face to face with the Poet Joydeb Basu) - will add to the documentation in Bangla comprising the viewpoint of art and poetry from a left-of-centre angle while unfurling the agony and ecstasy of practising poetry in a trying time. Hawakol deserves the credit of bringing a different arena to focus.

When Satchidanandan writes a poem of love and longing, he never writes about tear, flower, and waiting, he writes something else. And that ‘else’ is the essence of the philosophy of his poem. The birth, growth, and maturity of Satchidananda’s poetry can be compared with that immortal phrase-’ poetry should come as a leave comes to a tree’. The poems from the book THE WHISPERING TREE easily takes a reader to a celestial level with the magic and aura created by the observation, interpretation, weight-music- color of the words, exploration of various levels of meaning of human crisis and at one point reader discovers himself in such a state where some undiscovered and unexplained images stand as a tapestry to reverberate a song of love in a language which was never heard before. Satchidnandan is the “poet of Voiceless” and in this collection, he became the voice of century-old voice of love which was being remained pressed and suppressed under the clamor of platitude expression love. It was said in Veda that words are like woman, she uncovers herself only to a particular man of her choice and Satchidanandan is that worthy human being, words uncover their beauty in front of him.