Skip to main content

Urge to Merge

 


Book Review

Title: Heartfelt Symphonies

Author: Chinmayee Gayatree Sahu

Format: PDF E-book

All genuine art is a longing to transcend the self. Chinmayee Gayatree Sahu’s poems articulate that longing eloquently and evocatively. Heartfelt Symphonies is a collection of 40 poems divided into three groups entitled Nature, Fire and Life. The first two poems act as a kind of invocation of the divine. Interestingly, the very first poem, ‘Devi’, is an assertion of the divinity of the feminine as much as it is an invocation of goddess Durga. “Look around and you shall see HER (goddess) in each feminine body,” the poet asserts vehemently. It is also interesting to note that the second poem is an invocation of Shiva, the potent male counterpart of Durga. We meet Shiva’s various avatars here: Adiyogi, Ardhanariswara, the Tandav dancer, and Neelkantha.

The tremendous energy possessed by these two deities suffuses the remaining poems all of which are thoroughly secular and worldly. A ubiquitous form of energy in the entire collection is an urge to merge into a higher being which is what transcendence means. “YOU are the ocean where I want to merge, / to dance like the waves is my strongest urge,” the poet says in ‘Dancing Waves’. The poet longs to be a wave in the ocean, a part of the infinity, while at the same time there is ample evidence that the YOU (the upper case belongs to the poet) is also a human lover whose glance sets the poet persona on a high tide.

This dual longing for merging into the infinity as well as with a human lover is the essence of Chinmayee’s poems. Human love has its inevitable limitations and imperfections and the poet is acutely aware of it. Many of the poems are about broken love, “cracks in the heart” [‘Rain Drops’], and longing for a healing hug [‘Winter is Here’]. But there is no place for frustration or capitulation here. The poet bounces back after each setback. The woods may be dark but there are always “rays of hope” penetrating the “thickest canopy”.

If the Nature poems employ metaphors and images from nature, the Fire poems rely on the evocative power of light. This section brings us the light of kindness, the cheerfulness of carpe diem [‘Cheers to the Bonfire’], and acceptance of imbalances and imperfections. There is a steely determination

To withstand the pain,

To tolerate the suffering,

To rise from the puddle of rejection,

To fight every voice that tries to judge,

To resolve to get up after every fall,

To look into the eyes of the fear,

To enable me to keep my head high above my shoulder

[‘The Fire Within’]

In the last section titled ‘Life’, we come across some of the finest poems of the collection. Presenting a woman who sold her soul to the commerce of contemporary obsession with the female body, the poet shows how such an obsession will lead one to sure self-destruction. “How dumb she was, busy to impress and not express / how foolish she was to give in to the fad and undress!” [‘Beauty for notifications’]

Chinmayee’s poetry is extracted from raw experiences of life. The lines carry both light and darkness, love and rejection, hope and despair. But the good side always wins in the end. Even when everything “seems like falling apart”, there is light at the end of the tunnel if only you keep moving. [‘Look within, Look around’].

What really strikes one about Chinmayee’s poetry may be the veneer of mysticism that glosses the dominant urge in it to merge into a larger reality in spite of the possible rejections by that reality. After all, much of life lies in that grey area “between the shadow and the soul” (Pablo Neruda’s phrase) and Chinmayee succeeds in identifying the meaningful patterns which punctuate that area.


The collection can be downloaded here.

PS. The above book is part of The Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. My own contribution to it is – LIFE: 24 Essays.  

Comments

  1. I am touched sir🙏. And I am honoured! This means the world to me. Thank you for such words of appreciation . These poems were written over a long period of time and I am really elated that you liked my attempt at expressing myself through poetry. Immensely grateful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A lovely review that kindles the interest of readers to read it..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's little good poetry nowadays. Chinmayee comes as a welcome breeze.

      Delete
  3. This was a wonderful review. I'm always in awe of reviewers and how well they articulate their thoughts while reviewing a book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so