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Amitava Chakrabarty.
So I Used Gray and Other Poems. Writers Workshop.
pp 61. The book is priced at Rs 120/- in India + postal
charges.
Available from
Alibaba.com
About
Amitava Chakrabarty
is a class I Marine Officer of Kolkata Port Trust by profession and
a writer, journalist and poet by passion. As a freelance journalist,
he has contributed several reports in Hindustan Times.
The Statesman has published his letters/ articles/
stories and poems in its respective columns. His poems were
published in Times of India and Asian Age.
He is regularly published in numerous journals, e-magazines and
anthologies in India and abroad. He is an Honorary Life member of
Metverse Muse and a member of World Poets' Society, Greece. His
first anthology of poems, entitled Solitude, has
received favourable review in the domain of poetry. Chakrabarty is
one of the winners of the 1st publishing contest of
Aquilrelle.com
Amitave
Chakrabarty's second book of poems, So I Used Gray and
Other Poems was published in December 2010.
Commentary
This issue is a
work of art. It is a book containing poems of love pathos and
satires against social evils. Its a way to revolt against the
corrupt political system. It delves deep into the love hate
passion hope and hopelessness of a common man.
~Alibaba.com
THERE are poets who dwell in the realms of allegory for the sake
of it, which particular aesthetic bent often impedes the soft
lyrical grace of their verse. Chakrabarty is certainly not one
of them. The thousand incitements of postmodern versification
notwithstanding — especially the urge to appear complex and
render audible through a lonely voice a million gasps —
Chakrabarty likes rollicking in the archaic splendour of
romanticism; likes spending sublime hours in his secluded nook
listening to the “still sad music of humanity”. He prefers
lyricism to jarring symbolism and his poetry springs from the
depths of his wounded liberalism — his is a subdued voice, not
complaining but moaning the ills of the world and the transience
of life that subverts every human attempt at constructing
meaning and values.
This frustrated metaphysical quest lies at the root of
Chakrabarty’s poetry, giving his metaphors meaning and making
his irony pointed: a irony that cuts through shallow political
verisimilitude and cultural commonplaces in its search for the
truly tragic. At turns acerbic and grim, his irony seldom
degenerates into savagery, of the sort readers of contemporary
poetry are pretty familiar with, and his satire — never
condescending but almost always sharp — relentlessly and
unfailingly exposes the inconsistencies inherent in conventional
social norms and the foibles and frailties that hold back the
possibility of self-knowledge — the poet’s sovereign and
inalienable objective.
Rejecting the myriad allurements of abstract symbolism and the
urge to indulge in semantic quibbles, Chakrabarty’s free-flowing
verse, often embroidered in rhyme, dishes out emotions, ideas
and conflicts characterising modern life in a manner befitting a
mind immersed in the profound pleasures of poetry.
The first stanza of the short poem "Wounded" would suffice to
demonstrate Chakrabarty’s characteristic poetic qualities:
Those loving
touches on me you left
Are wounds that don’t heal,
And all the bliss I ever dreamt —
Haunt my senses still.
Honest, simple, straightforward, the product of a mind lost in
the uncontrived, idyllic world of love, basking in a newfound
inner serenity that follows every honest confession… readers
wouldn’t be far off the mark in drawing an inevitable parallel
between the poet of Wounded and the young Wordsworth.
Many of the poems that have found their way into the collection
first appeared in The Statesman. An unmistakably original voice,
Chakrabarty would surely appeal to a wide cross section of
readers, not least because of the effortless amalgam of social
awareness and lyrical charm his work showcases.
~from
The Statesman
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