Random Descent

by Jayanta Mahapatra

59 great poems culled from different journals. Lovely paper, good binding, printed with loving care.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jayanta Mahapatra (22 October 1928 – 27 August 2023) was an Indian English poet. He is the first Indian poet to win a Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry.

Reviews

[Bijay Kant]

Random Descent is one of those latest volumes of the poet wherein he takes up bare realism, feminism, gender bias, prejudice, social discrimination, economic disparity, poverty, underdevelopment, communal frenzy and so on apart from being imagistic, photographic, linguistic and mythic. The volume has changed, but the man has not over the years; his style is the same which he started with earlier. Mahapatra as a poet so much Wordsworthian, Keatsian, Lawrentine as well as Yeatsian. So is his volume of poetry, Shadow Space. A poet who has taught physics in the classrooms is nihlistic, existential and absurd too as his verses sometimes mean it not and there is much word-play in them. A poet of Odisha, he writes with the Orissans in hi mind, but is uniquely nation and international where you cannot doubt. His relationship with Odisha is unbreakable as he cannot without describing Puri, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Balsore.

[Salil]

Mahapatra at his most mature.

Includes great lines like

A scream that never ends (‘Scream’)

the cries of women made hostages by history (‘Mask of Longing’)

Does a raped sixteen-year-old girl
build a hymn of the world
where living is a flamboyant metaphor? (‘The Portrait’)

I am the one who has killed you,
with my emptiness
with the universe of my words
with the thousand shards of conscience
and the bloodlessness of my limited existence. (‘I Am the One’)

The following lines are from another book:

Of that love, of that mile
walked together in the rain,
only a weariness remains.