September 4,2009,Friday
BOOKSHELF
You come across this 21-year-old youth debuting with his first anthology of poems Coconut and Hay and you hesitate over which word to use-precocious or prodigy. I guess it's an amalgam of both and Dhrijyoti, comfortable without his surname is equally worshiping his MUSE with a refreshing lack of self-consciousness and avoiding the over wrought verbosity of young poets, who mostly write of unrequited love and run away hormones,Dhrijyoti is not afraid to explore and cross predictable boundaries,sure of his own idiom and displaying a refreshing originality of images and thought process.
Coconut and Hay, released recently and warmly endorsed by stalwarts such as Mamoni Raisom Goswami and Dr.Lakshminandan Bora, contains 66 poems embodying a young poet's subjective philosophy of objects, people, ethnicity, sexuality, existentialism and voluntarism, intricacies of relationships, insurgency, etc. He sets the bar high and has a certain bravura that allows him to experiment, unhindered by the weight of tradition. From the coming of age 'Being thirteen',where he is obssessed with his adolescent self, he ventures to the volcano of Santiago and coup of Salvador, speaking of the Berlin Wall and Somalia. There is poignant story-telling in 'My Master's Love', where stark, simple words evoke a tender love and heartbreak. His wide reading and reflective nature is apparent in 'Nirvana', where he fiercely argues against this state of other-worldly bliss. The title poem is awash with nostalgia. 'The Smell of the quilt' is startling in its boldness and encapsulates the illicit thrill of a secret liaison, revealing a maturity much beyond his years . Though the poet's approach is often post-modern and marked by a brash, contemporary, nervous edge, the references to Jocasta, Hamlet, elements of Hindu philosophy, Zionism show he has armed himself with enough reading to flesh out his creative outpourings. However, he does best in his intensely personal pieces and should not cling to inter textual references just for the sake of it. But, the fact that someone from the MTV generation is familiar with Nabokov and Neruda, not to speak of Auden, Spender, Larkin, Kamala Das and Aravind Krishna Mehrotra is reason enough to rejoice.
No comments:
Post a Comment