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Another Soliloquy
Poems by Ananya Chatterjee and Shruti Goswami
64 pages, Paperback
First published July 8, 2014
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September 6, 2019
A very short book review. - Another Soliloquy by Ananya Chatterjee/ Shruti Goswami published by Shambhabi Imprint
I am one of the administrators of a group called Rejected Stuff. What I mainly or basically do there is lurk like an obsessed stalker and read every post. While doing that I come across several writers who are worthy of notice, irrespective of likes they get or not and comments and shares they are able to generate or not. Two of them sent me their book, one they have written together. It has a fine cover by an artist who I understand has become of some repute, namely Tamojit Bhattacharya and has, of course, Kiriti Sengupta's meaningful words in it about these two poets as to why they matter.
I have already read and reviewed Ananya's first book but this one shows her in a much better light. There is a marked difference between the poems in her first book and this one - these are better. A thought that crossed my mind, one of both surprise and happiness, is at the impressive number of good poets we are producing in English from West Bengal and Kerala, which does not mean that they are not there in the other states, but the number is more in these two because of a long-standing tradition, many of whom are young but imbued like Ananya with a drive and passion for excellence.
I dealt with a poem by Ananya in my earlier review so would like to talk more of Shruti, this time. To come back briefly to Rejected Stuff, along with poets like Santosh Bakaya, Pramila Khadun and Reena Prasad I have found these two - and several other young writers, mostly women - able to put up poems of a very high quality that get them readers and likes and comments that show they really set on fire something in the hearts of their readers, a quality I find admirable. I know that likes can be engineered, and so can comments and shares which come from friends but this is not just that. The truth is they set the house or group, to use a metaphor, on fire. Shruti, for instance, has an edge in her perspective on topics of interest or the burning issues of the day and a sultry sensuousness in her love poems that just makes her words/poems sizzle.
Here is one - one that everyone will love, surprisingly simple and complex, Indian and womanly and yet having something in it that will arrest the attention of any man who really wants to understand the psyche of women.
Undress
Every day, you undress me,
In your thoughts,
My traditional mind,
Bordering on conservative;
Detested, protested;
Yet surprisingly never resisted.
And now,
Every day, I undress me,
In my thoughts,
For your thoughts,
And undress those thoughts,
Traditional, to be or not to be,
Bordering on insanity.
While I may object to the use of punctuation here and the absence of certain prepositions and pronouns and pronoun misuse in one place the poem itself is so startling that I was arrested, grabbed or pulled into it - to echo Shruti's -ed usage smile emoticon - by its power. Rough diamond or not, the poem is deep in its depiction of a dilemma in the struggling mind of a woman between the drives of wanting to be desired and wanting to try to control the way in which one is desired, due to one's upbringing, and failing, and it is in trying to express this psychological tension that Shruti has written a poem worth reading!
The book too is worth reading.
I am one of the administrators of a group called Rejected Stuff. What I mainly or basically do there is lurk like an obsessed stalker and read every post. While doing that I come across several writers who are worthy of notice, irrespective of likes they get or not and comments and shares they are able to generate or not. Two of them sent me their book, one they have written together. It has a fine cover by an artist who I understand has become of some repute, namely Tamojit Bhattacharya and has, of course, Kiriti Sengupta's meaningful words in it about these two poets as to why they matter.
I have already read and reviewed Ananya's first book but this one shows her in a much better light. There is a marked difference between the poems in her first book and this one - these are better. A thought that crossed my mind, one of both surprise and happiness, is at the impressive number of good poets we are producing in English from West Bengal and Kerala, which does not mean that they are not there in the other states, but the number is more in these two because of a long-standing tradition, many of whom are young but imbued like Ananya with a drive and passion for excellence.
I dealt with a poem by Ananya in my earlier review so would like to talk more of Shruti, this time. To come back briefly to Rejected Stuff, along with poets like Santosh Bakaya, Pramila Khadun and Reena Prasad I have found these two - and several other young writers, mostly women - able to put up poems of a very high quality that get them readers and likes and comments that show they really set on fire something in the hearts of their readers, a quality I find admirable. I know that likes can be engineered, and so can comments and shares which come from friends but this is not just that. The truth is they set the house or group, to use a metaphor, on fire. Shruti, for instance, has an edge in her perspective on topics of interest or the burning issues of the day and a sultry sensuousness in her love poems that just makes her words/poems sizzle.
Here is one - one that everyone will love, surprisingly simple and complex, Indian and womanly and yet having something in it that will arrest the attention of any man who really wants to understand the psyche of women.
Undress
Every day, you undress me,
In your thoughts,
My traditional mind,
Bordering on conservative;
Detested, protested;
Yet surprisingly never resisted.
And now,
Every day, I undress me,
In my thoughts,
For your thoughts,
And undress those thoughts,
Traditional, to be or not to be,
Bordering on insanity.
While I may object to the use of punctuation here and the absence of certain prepositions and pronouns and pronoun misuse in one place the poem itself is so startling that I was arrested, grabbed or pulled into it - to echo Shruti's -ed usage smile emoticon - by its power. Rough diamond or not, the poem is deep in its depiction of a dilemma in the struggling mind of a woman between the drives of wanting to be desired and wanting to try to control the way in which one is desired, due to one's upbringing, and failing, and it is in trying to express this psychological tension that Shruti has written a poem worth reading!
The book too is worth reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review