BOOK REVIEW: ‘Monsoon Arrives at the Junction Crossing’

Bhaskar Parichha

What does one, as a rule, expect from a 23-year-old poet? A mishmash of thoughts, millennial phrases, and paltry text? Not in the case of Madhura Banerjee, for sure. Madhura’s poems are evocative, insightful and her thoughts are broad spectrum. ‘Monsoon Arrives at the Junction Crossing’ (Dhauli Books, Bhubaneswar) is a pleasant collection of poems one has come across from a young poet.

Madhura is Kolkata-born and a techie who has made Bangaluru her residence. If she has the natural advantage of a place and a community to cultivate poetry, she has been doing this with great aplomb. In reality, she has been into writing from an early age. A contributor to newspapers, an artist of the All India Radio and a TEDx speaker, poetry comes rather easily to Madhura.

Each of the poems in this collection is a statement, a proclamation. Passionately written and with a lot of energy going into each verse, the poems are charming, perceptive and rewarding. No poem will escape the reader’s curious eyes; and as one flips through the poems, one after another, one is transported into melancholy and schmaltziness.

With little over seventy poems, decently structured and inventively arranged, Monsoon Arrives has a purpose, an end-point. Reads the blurb: ‘This is the journey of the rain, from summer to winter and back. Round and round, upon the rail tracks of the seasons carrying stories from every place it visits, the hearts moved by its symphony clipped as bogeys, onto this never-ending train.’ Madhura is a passionate traveler and, obviously, all her writing ‘invariably comes back to images of mountains, seas, and jungles.’

The first poem in this collection is unmistakably fresh: ‘the rain in my country has a name when it comes after summer – It flows into ragas, christening taals, and sargams'(The Seasons-in-Between I). Or take this one: ‘Here, romance is never discreet/Verses whispered in bushes by the pond/echo louder in the rustling breeze/And, by end of the season,/lanes light up, pulsating and fluorescent,/with love stories that aren’t theirs'( A Hurried Spring).

Madhura’s oeuvre is truly exasperating. As a tribute to Tagore’s ‘Nashtanirh’ and Ray’s ‘Charulata’, this poem is a truly realistic one:’Charu peers through her opera glasses/with eyes shaped like window shutters/whose lashes are made of dust and feathers shed by swallows from broken nests( Charulata’s Opera Glasses).

If sometimes  Madhura gets the inspiration to write down a portion of poetry from a photograph (Dirty Linen), she recollects her school days to pen another few lines (The Room at the End of the Hall). Some poems are written from Goa’s Colva Beach, Rourkela Station, Dehradun and some are written for close friends (Stillwater Lives). There is even a poem on Professor Stephen Hawking (A History of Brief Times).

Intimacy and sarcasm are what preponderantly present in her poems. Take this one: ‘in a few family albums/the photographs are arranged in no particular order /My parent’s first vacation by the sea stood next to my father’s rice ceremony’ (Fictional Picture Frames).’ Ganguly’s Garden’ has a similar emotion.

What, then, Madhura’s maiden poetry compilation wants to depict? ‘This is a journey of journeys – some fulfilling, some incomplete, some clear about destinations, some following the rhythm of a rhythm-less wind. Of words clipped on to the fabric of the sky in a patchwork of train windows -of stanzas that collide at the junction s of different places, seasons or lives.’

‘Monsoon Arrives’ is a speckled bag of dominant imagery and time-honored themes. Each of the poems is delicately told and has a touch of forbearance.

‘Monsoon Arrives at the Junction Crossing’

Madhura Banerjee

 Dhauli Books

Gobindeswar Road

Old Town

Bhubaneswar 751002