Book Name: Earth Elegies

Poet: Ajanta Paul,

Publisher: Penprints, Kolkata, 2023, Pp 108, INR 250

Reviewer: Jaydeep Sarangi

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Earth Elegies is a high-octane personal reflection with a call to collection responses, leaving the readers with a sense of urgency and speak of hope for a better tomorrow. The poems in this collection sing our elegies to our planet, to ourselves, to life as we hold matters of our mother earth.  The poet’s concerns are genuine and they are rhythms of resurrection, ‘gloom-gladness of grace’:

“Still I reason, may be this ruin

Will, someday, fertilize the scorched terrain.” (‘Ruin’, p. 29, )

Earth Elegies is a sensitive meditation on hard truths of human life and the environment. Myths and legends are its capital. Ajanta Paul moves between Mesopotamia and Maya. Her poetic self hears massacre in the acid rain and a nuclear explosion:

“In cataclysms that destroy

I hear the fall of Troy.” (‘Ruin’, p.28)       

Ajanta Paul is a fine word painter. She digs below the surface of the subconscious mind for a sylvan salvation:

“Weaving syllables of silence

Across margins without moorings

A ghost town of memories

In a poem, still and bare,

Planting signposts to nowhere.” (‘Stranded’, p.21)

 How old is ‘old’, really? The earth endures all. The poet philosophises. The earth is forced to fight to endure because humans cause her harm and make things harder on her. It is really an unfortunate fact that human beings have not taken good care of the land that has been placed in our guardianship. Hopefully, it is not too late. Like birds and animals sensing more than humans, the sensitive poet feels the earth trembling. She thinks that God will listen to her prayers.

“Rage, rage, universe

Till your hinges fall apart

In an apocalypse of ardour.” (‘Paralysis of Prayer’, p. 49)

Can earth be Earth when all its trees are gone, and sudsy waters have become unfit? Our earth provides us with a complex web of interconnected life forms. It has a variegated wealth of natural resources. These resources are the foundation of our societies and economies. Ajanta Paul is a committed artist:

I do not give up dreaming

Not even when the dark ocean

Of sleep drags me to oblivion (.) (‘Light for our Children’, p. 55)

But hope spread its petals in the thorny desert of mundane activities.

Ajanta Paul’s poems are gratifying melody amidst the moving spheres breaks forth, a solemn and entrancing sound, A harmony whereof the earth's green hills, blue oceans and the sky give but the faintest echo; yet is there. With a gust of positive energy the poet visualizes the rustle of the leaves upon the trees when the foliage of summer is move in the breeze:

“Every time the rains

Turned the street outside

The house into a river(.)” (‘The house that was’, p. 74)        

Ajanta Paul is a consistent soul maker. Her canvas of thoughts is a ‘rainforest of rapture’. She powerfully suggests for changing the paradigm by changing attitudes. The confessional poetess exclaims, “Every day a bit of me dies(.)” For her, it is necessary that different elements of our planet are interconnected to make one living world:

 “No cartography in the world

Can separate us.

For we are the world.”    (‘World’, p.100)

This affirmation of common in-group understanding is supported in the lines to follow where it is clear that the environment allows the poet to once again be moved by the beauty she is able to extract from the quiet allure of the mindscape. There lies the magic of Ajanta Paul’s poetic diorama. Hers is a rare fabric:

“Kite cancels kite

In a legitimate fight.” (‘Callous Rite’, p. 102)

 Even in these dynamics of integrated faith and order of things, the human mind can be king. Ajanta Paul’s   beguilingly simple use of language reflects and constructs identity. Her bold images make darkness palpable. Intersectional subtlety of the poems in this collection arrests our attention. These amazing poems in Earth Elegies remind us how literature is a spesh mode of knowing the world and truths and perhaps, it can give us an adequate apprehension of future experiences through a wide orbit of images and symbols related to the biosphere, time’s daily course and its routine consequences. Reading Earth Elegies, our gypsy heart longs for a retreat.