A poetic gaze | Book Review: Mellowed with Years by Debasis Panigrahi

The outcry of the moralist within the poet towards the trendy industrial civilisation is palpable: “People have lengthy/savaged mom nature/and now she is/extracting revenge,…” (from Life within the Time of Corona).

By Deba Prasad Nanda

The gathering of poems, Mellowed with Years by Debasis Panigrahi, is a e book that displays the lived expertise of the poet. And one can simply detect his self-reflexivity: “However typically,/Someplace,/On one’s journey,/one will get a breather,/to look upon oneself…” (from Entitlements). The gaze is as a lot on the surface world as it’s educated on oneself. Self-criticism, self-conceptualisation go hand-in-hand in these poems. However the self shouldn’t be abstracted from the others. The poems have an intrinsic functionality to rise above the slender individualistic confines to resonate with others. The stage is ready by the pandemic. In a way, the common and the actual mix seamlessly: “Additionally we’re all fearful/and fearful/and brittle to the core” (from Lockdown Monologues). The outcry of the moralist within the poet towards the trendy industrial civilisation is palpable: “People have lengthy/savaged mom nature/and now she is/extracting revenge,…” (from Life within the Time of Corona).

Modernity’s ambivalence in direction of unreason has been vividly portrayed by Panigrahi in two poems: When the Thoughts Performs Video games and Sanity. They bring about out in daring aid how the unconscious asserts itself in a method that leaves the agent helpless: “I get up each morning/with a dreadful feeling/that one thing horrible/goes to occur./Then I wait and wait endlessly,/to expertise the/foreboding taking part in/itself out” (from When the Thoughts Performs Video games). This taking part in out is past rational/scientific clarification; solely meanings could be connected to it. Even then there isn’t a assurance that one wouldn’t typically turn out to be opaque to oneself. And Sanity explores the delicate and fuzzy line between purpose and unreason, with out privileging one over the opposite.

Panigrahi’s poems are crafted very a lot within the postmodernist ethos and sensibilities. Name it spirituality or religiosity—it is a thread that marks his poems. Additional, the romance with town of Cuttack and the accolades showered on it (in Cuttack) are a veneration of the native and, therefore, intimate. And anyone who goes by way of these poems will discover that tentativeness—the eschewal of certitude-buttresses the entire work.

Deba Prasad Nanda is affiliate professor, Deshbandhu School, College of Delhi

Mellowed with Years
Debasis Panigrahi
Rubric Publishing
Pp 105, Rs 225