Book Reviews
Amitabh Mitra’s Tonight
- An Anthology of World Love Poetry
Amitabh Mitra’s Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry is a fascinating kaleidoscope of poems of love created by the poets from several countries. Tonight includes poems revealing Mitra’s determined and characteristically emotional quest for love. W. H. Auden rightly felt: “Let us love each other or die.” Matthew Arnold also indicates the importance of love: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.” There are many proverbs about the significance of love. “Love conquers all” (Virgil). “All you need is love” (The Beatles). Walter Pater remarks that the great Pre-Raphaelite poet D. G. Rossetti (1828-1882) was ever a lover, servant and singer, faithful as Dante, of Beatrice (Pater:216). We are moved and stimulated by wonderful images in Amitabh’s “Gwalior” where we find the lyrical intensity at its best:
Where have you gone
Where have I gone
Only a breath stood
Waiting (106)
Your smile unleashed a sea
In the ravines
Palaces were swept off
To a distant sky (108)
The lyrical gift of Amitabh is undeniable.
Adam Donaldson Powell’s “Je m’accuse” emphasizes that “the rhythms of our hearts” leave us “dizzy and child-like”, and transcend “the rotation of the earth”. The most significant thing about Powell as a poet is his energy, passion and power of vivid description:
Then-captured by your stellar eyes
And crescent smile,
I arrested the first word in mid-breath ( 53)
“The course of true love never runs smooth”, so Powell seizes “the first word in mid-breath”, and the miracle happens. “During isolated moments of intense experience, when the miracle happens, life takes on the intensity of art” (Virginia Woolf).
Victoria Valentine’s two poems “John” and “Caves” included in Tonight are remarkable for the purely visual quality of images like ‘ashes of bridges burned’, ‘exploring the caves’, ‘heaving mattress’.
Glory Sasikala Franklin’s “Let me in” generates the desired, essential atmosphere of yearning and longing:
Let me into the coolness of your touch
A thousand births and ten thousand deaths
Being baptized again and again
Till my name is lost in yours. (83)
Geoff Jackson’s “When was Then” and “Fallen for You” will surely appeal to what lies deepest in us-passion and its intercommunication. Jackson has the power to reveal the most delicate outward manifestations of the emotion of love:
Skidding on wings of white
You flew me (14)
And the following from “Fallen for You”:
Hot like a sun storm
And yet I bathe in your eyes benign
Sink underwater to greeny depths (14)
Bhuwan Thapaliya’s “Arise, O love of my love, resolve to make love” reveals that the code of love is ‘the haven of our trust’. Roger Humes’ “All Poets live in Exile” is remarkable for sweet and generous sympathies touching the human heart in love:
Only by giving away all
May the memory of your heart
Burn with the eternal gift of mine (77)
Brett Beiles’ “mixed messages” spontaneity of feeling in the following lines places the poet on a par with the best in literature:
Whenever I’m in the corridor
There he is
Lurking (78).
Jeanpaul Ferro’s “Restoration” rich with overtones of feeling is profoundly romantic:
This most beautiful, beautiful oneness,
Stepping stone to God
Cross over to creation, paradise (16)
Amitabh’s anthology Tonight indicates that the included poets are quite sensitive to the varied aspects of love, to its sensuous glory and ecstasies. Nearly all poems in Tonight throw a glistening image of love before the reader’s eye.
Works Cited
Mitra, Amitabh Ed. Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry The Poets Printery, East London, South Africa, 2008, pp. 118, Paperback, ISBN o-620-41372-7
Pater, Walter. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”. Appreciations. Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1931
21-Apr-2014
More by :
Dr. Santosh Kumar
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