Each poem in this book is a meditation on what it means to be human.
Mahua Sen
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.
–Dylan Thomas
Dr. Santosh Bakaya’s ‘What is the Meter of the Dictionary?’ is an impressive collection of poems that compels us not only to delve deeper into our inner core and the world around us, but also into the cavern of what it is to connect with nature and experience its indispensable bond with humanity.
The lamina of Santosh Bakaya’s verses drips and drops on your skin and seeps into your bone as you sip it slowly like an old wine to savour the emotions they evoke. You try to catch the myriad thoughts that dart across you and then you clutch the syllables in your fist and sit with your casket of imagination and locution, to arrange and rearrange and assemble through the trail of what they unravel.
Santosh Bakaya’s geometrically engineered poems, both in diction and imagery, sometimes act as the rear view mirror reflecting your long lost days that are not really lost from your mind’s boudoir. Her poems bring them back into your psyche and you get drenched in the incessant torrential rain of the bygone. And then you hang your thoughts in the placid vanilla sky. They soar unabashedly, claiming their mortgaged sky, making you experience a parallel realm of some sort, gifting you a safe sojourn.
Lips sealed, I look around, wistfully,
Carefully tucking a strand of grey hair behind my ear,
A restless heart beating to the notes of that long lost song,
So sublime, so soothing
Some poems are like the calm of a tranquil ocean. They are like that sweet, tender punctuated silence when fingers braid beneath the sigh of a lover’s kiss. And in stark contrast, some poems tear open the lacrimal duct of your eyes and your unremitting tears squirt up to meet the mammoth ocean of your soul.
The poems in the anthology are often birthed out of her personal experiences, yet they have an universal appeal. The verses reflect her tender empathetic heart and you feel a lump in the throat and tears well up in your eyes as you read lines like these:
The poor bedraggled often gapes
At the luxurious cars zooming past,
Casts envious looks at the gluttons gorging on street food.
He pats his stomach
Trying in vain to stop the rumbling rebellion inside
Poetry is a tool for reflection. It cannot be compartmentalised into a single box for it is the expression of multi-layered human emotions in aesthetically curated verses, decked with poetic tools. And, thus, it acts as a portal to transmit what a poet perceives, thinks and feels in her eyes, those abstractions, into something tangible, birthed through her eloquent nib. The poems act as a prism to reflect a spectrum of emotions. Each poem in this book is a meditation on what it means to be human.
Grief stricken, famished and scruffy humanity
Slogs on for miles, barefooted,
The tooting of warmongers growing louder
every minute.
A linnet’s exuberant song goes unheard.
After all, it is only an inconsequential bird,
Who does nothing but sing, in its untiring mission
of celebrating life.
These lines are hard hitting! The poem is exquisite and wrapped in vulnerability and resolve that I find too relatable. It doesn’t flinch or sugar coat our shared predicament, instead encourages us to take a deep look of the hard world we live in, nudges us to introspect and ask us why we can’t be a bit more kind and empathetic towards each other, for life is singular and it’s not worth the war and hatred. Why can’t compassion shape the contours of our soul? Why can’t we be gentler towards each other and spread love and light? Why can’t we make it a better place for each other?
The poems in this book expose reality in all of its multi-coloured arrays, weaving together, birds and flowers, the octogenarian, the insensible virility of the war mongers, the poignant echoes of security guards, the plight of rickshaw pullers, so on and so forth. The book is at once light and dense, profound and playful, chaos and calm.
My personal favourite poem from this book is Look Mommy (for the Blue Roses). I had tears streaming down my face as I read through these lines:
What is the difference between me and the others? Me and the others-both
Have mothers-and fathers too-so where lies the difference?
Why am I different?
Santosh Bakaya’s labour of love – What is the Meter of the Dictionary? -produces moments that feel epiphanic. They inspire us to pause for a while and listen to the beating of our own heart and look inwards. The poet’s keen observation and her eloquence in translating them into gorgeous poetry provoke the addiction of contemplation. Her poems make us fall in love with poetry all over again. Each poem is a crystalline moment perfectly melded with the honesty of the poet’s nib.
The black and white cover design is unique, in contrast to the myriad hues of emotions that the poems evoke. I must mention the exquisite foreword written by author, editor, critic, Sunil Sharma that gives a wonderful sneak peek into the book. And how can I not mention the incisive blurb by the erudite author, poet, academician Dr Ampat Koshy! He writes: “This poetry book is a welcome introduction to her richness of allusion, and vocabulary, and mastery of luscious description, personification, and compelling narrative in verse.”
Mahua Sen is an author, editor, poet based out of Hyderabad.
