HOMECOMING (Poems:1975-1991)

HOMECOMING consists of fifty poems of contemporary reality, social relations and human values, while keeping in mind the need for peace and adjustment for a more beautiful world. Excerpts: THE HEART OF THE AFFAIR A lonely island across the ocean With all her summer charms Is just a change I may intend To relax in its arms. Let me set my home In order first; Let me nurture love there Where I shall breathe my last. Home smells sweet when there is Unselfish devotion and care In all corners, giving strength And confidence to fare. The nucleus at home is trust, Which, in itself, is an inspiration, More humble and humane in its ardent Sense of belonging and concern. ________________ WAITING FOR THE IMAGE What difference does it make If leaves yellow and fall Or a little innocence hangs on To age and gets crucified? Saint or sinner, one has to see more. There are more beneath the tree, Much to wonder. The unfortunate ones wail everywhere, While blood-thirsty brutes move free In our sanctuary of lawlessness. In the shallow waters of self-interest Where only formalities float In the show of freedom and benevolence, It is vain to expect concern From the heartless crooks and felons. Won’t our disillusion, our loss of faith Allow any image to rise above With all its fondness and finality To smother our consciousness with love, So that when we get entangled in worries It may cut the net and make us move again? _______________ HOMECOMING is the third poetry collection of Bipin Patsani published in 2010. It has been dedicated to his maternal grandfather late Kunjabihari Samantaray and grandmother late Netramani Devi of Barasahi in the Khurda District of Odisha, India. __________________________________________________________ Book Review __________________________________________________________ Homecoming (Poems: 1975-1991) by Bipin Patsani WordSmith Publishers (Year of Publications: 2010) Guwahati, Assam Homecoming is the third collection of poetry by Bipin Patsani published in 2010. His first collection Voice of the Valley was published by Writers Workshop in 1993.His second collection Another Voyage came out the same year this collection Homecoming was published. Homecoming is a selection of poems by Patsani written two decades ago during a span of sixteen years. This collection contains fifty-one poems that poetically construct pictures selected from everyday life. The collection reveals the poet’s engagement with social issues of our times set against a moral inquisition. The poet adheres to no dogmatic matrix but takes pleasure in playfulness by contrasting images and ideas. He is caught between the progressive and the traditional views of the world. “When the advanced is looked down upon as wicked, the traditional is laughed at as obsolete”, he says in the poem Moral Values. But he would rather face the challenges with a creative defiance than seek defeatist escapism. Through subversive utterances he provokes the reader towards multiplicity of responses but in some of the poems the finality of tone in which he asserts a conclusion seems pedantically derived. The Preface of the book offers clue to understand his poems better. The poet’s fate is like searching for freedom like Orpheus trying to accept the loss of Eurydice. He has referred to Eliot, Camus, Racine, Pirandello, Keats, and Bergson in the brief (single page) preface in bringing the readers home to reality and pleads for a dynamism by which “one comes closer to reality and feels free”. The poem Song of the Happy Cripple is a subjective musing on acceptance, a poem on coming to terms with reality. The experience of being challenged is a part of the creative process, a unique knowledge discovered through a narcissistic exploration. But Patsani elevates this discovery with that of Columbus who “missed the way and reached a continent”. The whole collection is marked by an indomitable optimism. Poems like Death of a Parrot, The Rebel, The Purpose, Waiting for the Image, End of The Journey , From The Tower of Silence reflect a solemn mood but a positive gesture at life emerges through all of them. In Evening in the Camp of Narcissus he writes: Let us be glad that we have a small boat Against the dark sweeping waves Of the night That creeps noiseless like a cobra. Patsani consciously chisels the image of woman against patriarchal tradition as the deprived and marginalized. In The Inheritor, a poem depicting the memory of his maternal grandpa he recalls how his mother was denied her right to inherit the paternal property. He dedicates his poem Sati to Roop Kanwar who was murdered in the most gruesome manner. The question of identity of woman is raised in the poem. The poem A Corpse depicts the deformed corpse of a woman beside the railway line with her crushed limbs lying cold and exposed: These were all fire and poem Just hours back, Resembling the striking curves of the damsels of Konark. The last but one poem The Traffic is a long poem of eight sections. The poem is preceded by an introduction where Patsani recalls his days as a postgraduate student at Ravenshaw College (now a university), Cuttack and his close association with poets some of whom were teachers and some students there. The Traffic, according to Patsani “reflects European objectivity and Indian optimism in the midst of suffering and loss.”The style of the poem echoes structures of The Wasteland and offers an intertextual space implicated in a plethora of allusions to English literary texts. The last section of the poem ends with a note of hope and waiting for a realization that: In each battlefield There can be a Peace Pagoda Like the one in Kalinga. The anthology does not include love poems but poems on love. The construction of love hinges on mythic and collective grounds of human experience instead of being romantic representation of personal feelings. The intimation of the other shore, the magic of the unexplored prompts the poet to willingly face a world of innumerable suffering. In spite of the mythic and allusive scholarly materials the poems do not end up as riddles but transmit a bold and yet aesthetic sense of embracing life in all situations. Jayanta Mahapatra has aptly appreciated the “quality of sincerity and persistence” in Patsani’s poems. The anthology is a valuable addition to the corpus of Indian English Poetry today. Dr.Chittaranjan Misra Department of English,B.J.B.Autonomous College Bhubaneswar-751014, Odisha Chittaranjan_mishra@rediffmail.com