Dr Jaydeep Sarangi’s Memories of Words, which is his tenth book of English poems and eleventh volume of verse, invites the reader into a sanctuary of sounds and silences, replete with the whispers of words, susurration of syllables and traces of tongues. Saturated with the three Vedic gunas—Tamas, Rajas and Sattva—it is a place where words become worlds, unlocking secret spaces of the soul in which the mood gradually evolves from the lethargic through the passionate to the tranquil.

In the ‘Tamas’ section, the poet characteristically refers to absence and inertia, lamenting in the poem “July Evenings,” for instance: “I can neither see you nor hear you / only winter of things flow / at the wheel of flying to and fro.” In “Krishna”, he paradoxically locates the eponymous god in both “amplitude” and “void” even as he confesses, “False is all I make in the river of longings,” ending the poem with a fraught awareness of emptiness in the line: “Words, absences—all is a stormy night.”

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In the poem “Love No More,” the speaker resignedly sums up a universal truth: “Love lost is nothing new in the world. / It has a natural fall; a delayed rise somewhere.” The tolerance of loss, along with a belief in due recompense, is part of the larger attitude of acceptance shared by the speaker while in this state of mind. Lethargy, however, is seen to reach its nadir in the mentioned poem: “Nothing has happened, nothing will happen tomorrow,” suggesting the sterile stagnation of an incomprehensible and absurd world ruled by Tamas. In “My Rivulet of Waiting,” this sense of an enervating ennui is played out in recognisably Eliotesque tones: “The same habit is lived out everyday, noisy / in the same way, waiting for waiting…” culminating in shades of “connecting with nothing,” evoking echoes of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men.”

Movement, action and the journey are captured masterfully in the ‘Rajas’ section. The Appollonian stillness of the earlier section is sought to be replaced by the Dionysian energies of a passionate phase. In the poem “A Holy Plot,” for instance, the poet observes, “All things flow fast in the journey,” suggesting a dynamism that is both subjective and objective. In “When I Lose My Poem of Homes,” he says with a beguiling sagacity, “All started with poems / All can end with poems,” even as he realises, “Poems to poems is a long walk to freedom.” Interestingly, he plots the teleology of his thought within the coordinates of poems. Poetry orients him; it provides him with direction; and most importantly, it frees him.

The momentum of the onward march is effortlessly captured in another poem, “History of Waiting Out,” where he confirms, “There are no crossroads in history, magic doors / only moving on faithfully, to Time.” In other words, the poet sees history as a unidirectional flow of events, as one-way traffic to an ever-receding future without the iterative intersections or “crossroads” traditionally associated with thoroughfares. In “Return to Ruins,” he ends with a creative affirmation in the face of desolation: “Beyond Hampi’s ruins, / Tears of the Tungabhadra, / And it rains / Always for the first time.” Words like “ruins” and “rains,” trailing their historical associations of destruction and rejuvenation, respectively, create their own lexical nostalgia.

Gestural movement is delicately traced in the poem “On Our First Meeting,” as images on the canvas “turn around to show their full face.” This is a surreal, psychological turn, as the painted figures here not only assume a lifelike stance but also reveal their true identity. From the subtlety of artistic anagnorisis to the gratuitous violence of riot, the collection covers the gamut of passions that together make up the human experience. In the poem “Riot”, the speaker asks the anguished question, “On whose head did the blow fall hard? / Whose cradle left bare before its due time?” expressing the poet’s deep empathy with victims, sufferers and survivors. The journey continues, sometimes from destruction to renewal: “I created my own, planted a sapling there / I am not taking something away from myself.”

In the third and final section titled ‘Sattva’, the poetic vision achieves clarity of insight as it moves through incremental intuitions towards a state of grace. The words in the titles of this finale fittingly demonstrate, through their luminous quality, the spiritual ascent: “solidarity,” “wheels,” “a temple of delight,” “Guru pronam,” “friendship,” “dawning light,” “Beas of hope” and “passage to myself.”

Significantly, poetry is a ‘place’ for the poet, a shelter, home or destination that is mediated through spatial, architectural or structural imagery, at once evocative and apt. In the poem “Friendship”, for instance, “Time is… the rustle of leaves through the doors of great poems,” a startlingly beautiful image that unites time, nature and poetry in its alluring intermingling of the abstract with the sensual. In the poem “The Sun Moments” (dedicated to Jayanta Mahapatra), he wonders, “I doubt, if I lose all doors of paper  / how can I talk to a God?” recalling Mahapatra’s prose masterpiece Door of Paper, in which the latter had expressed his poetic beliefs. In “Sleep-Habit” he cries, “Hold me to your spaces / not as a tourist,  / to ancient stones and pebbles,” striving to find a sense of belonging that would grant him connectedness and an identity—a safe anchorage amidst tumult. Poetry is spatialized by Sarangi as he locates in it his refuge, a place which he simultaneously explores, attempts to belong to, and draws inspiration from.

This abode in poetry is not necessarily always a concrete one. The imagination, in the poem, “Voices in Solidarity,” for instance, lapses into history seeking the purity of a primordial condition in “mother tongue and culture,” not to mention the atavistic echoes of “Kalinga and Konarak” in “Wheels of Stones” and simple manifestations of faith in “forest paths leading to the temple” in “Temple of Delight.”

In the larger scope of things, Sarangi is a geographer who plots every inch of his land with loving care. The imagery of cartography runs through his poetry as, intent on map-making, he negotiates the latitudes and longitudes of his private domain, gathered inevitably from apprehensions of the outer world. In the very first poem, “Map Makers,” he speaks of a world

Where each day is a fresh leaf from history

Inhabiting the body of maps

Built by voices and visions.

The maps or territorial charts are often symbolic surveys of the spirit, as seen in the same poem where he reminisces.

Counting the lost links, old sea ports

Gathering and putting together

Different roads piercing the heart.

This notion of the charting or delineation of an inner landscape is borne out in another poem as well, namely, “Return to Ruins,” where he mentions the “radiant faces” of his friends “mapping / The mind, minding the maps somewhere / Beyond the Hampi ruins.”

In “July Evenings,” he confesses that he is “too feeble to cross the Pacific silence,” possibly referring to an unbridgeable ocean of inner silos, even as in the poem “Hunger” he instinctively seizes that moment of truth that makes a poem. And that is the image of the boy at the Kharagpur railway platform, dipping his bread in tea, “displaced by hunger: ruthless mouth roaring,” whose “piece of bread is his political country,” a searing snapshot of a dispossessed child without home or country to speak of, a “piece of bread” his passport to sustenance.

The common metaphor of the river unites the three sections of the book. In rivers, the poet seeks his source and locates a kindred spirit, rejuvenation and the community that his soul craves. The qualities of empathy, sensitivity and a profound closeness with nature enable Sarangi to accommodate all the rivers of the world in the capacious topography of his heart. From the Nile, Amazon and the Murray to the Ganga, Sindhu and the Padma, and the local Dulung, he invokes all rivers that flow like his verses along verdant banks of creativity, binding history and geography in their immemorial movement across cultures. In the poem “My Mate,” in the Tamas section, for instance, he pleads, “Dear river, pure silver of my words, /  Never take away the ventilator you always hold,” thereby testifying to the life-sustaining promise held by rivers.

In “Northern Rivers,” in the ‘Rajas’ cluster, he practically enumerates all the main rivers of north India, calling them “nation builders.” In the poem “Beas of Hope” in the ‘Sattva’ section, he evokes a vivid image of the exuberant Beas in the upper reaches of the mountain ranges, taking care to preserve the whole picture when he says, “Under the tropic sun, Dulung to Beas is a book of my ancestors,…” the physical journey of rivers is but a reflection of the lineage of blood in the speaker’s veins, which metaphorically encompasses the entire nation.

True to its title, the collection strives to recuperate the emotional etymologies of words, vestiges of vocabularies, or the rhetorical resonances that linger in the mind long after one has read a particular poem. In the poem “Memories of Words,” the poet explicates the theme of the collection, maintaining,

Words are loaded with possibilities random,

many windows holding images and conceits

touching the rainbow in the limitless blue.

All wisdom, says the speaker in “A Passage to Myself,” is collected in the “infinite archive” of the “voluptuously appealing river bank.” From such a prodigal powerhouse of knowledge are distilled “words” which the poet describes in “First Fire” as his “heritage.” In an interview given to Elisabetta Marino, ‘The River Within: An Interview with Jaydeep Sarangi,’ the poet says, “I open the doors of words and phrases and lead myself into the heart of thoughts,” interestingly inverting the conventional sequence of conception and expression. And since it is “memories of words” that Sarangi is primarily concerned with in this reverberating repertoire, appropriately, the final poem, “Epilogue” resonates with the quiet vibrations of his observation: “All come back with a pool of words, images,” the stillness of the water’s surface reflecting what is possibly an undistorted truth. In “A Passage to Myself” the poet is eventually able to piece together his story:

I gather my different histories, stones of colours

Pen them in words and images

collage them together in a grand pattern of gesture

and eventually find myself.

In the tradition of meta-poetry, several of the poems in the collection are aesthetic allegories describing their own genesis or locating the life experiences of the poet in aspects of the creative process. In the poem “In My Inbox,” for instance, the speaker refers to his “foliage of idioms.” Love is no longer “a piercing idiom to crack” in “Love No More,” while in “Memories of Words,” he refers to “the thesaurus of words,” where “memories unfold.” In “The Sun Moments” he expresses his creative journey not only through aesthetic terminology but also an intertextual tribute to his mentor, using the titles of one of Mahapatra’s book of poems, “A Rain of Rites”: “I leave the twilight of metaphors behind / passing through a rain of rites.” Such literary allusions, echoes and evocations are inevitably bound up with the “memories of words” that Sarangi celebrates so eloquently in this collection, reminding one of the notions of “tradition” and the “literary past” held by T.S. Eliot.

The senses play their part in this journey of spiritual enlightenment expressed through aesthetic correlatives. The image that haunts the consciousness in this regard is the symbol of poetic inspiration in the poem “Life’s Frame:” “long thundering downpour / straight through the green script everywhere.” Sarangi’s poetry in this collection is indeed a “green script,” natural, fresh, creative, and renewing itself with every shower of the imagination.

The reviewer is the principal of Women’s Christian College, Kolkata, India

Memories of Words

By Jaydeep Sarangi

Authorspress, 2023

76 pages, Rs 295/-