Jayanta Mahapatra’s Shadow Space, published for first time in 1997,
Opens with Living In Orissa poem,
Followed by Landscape, A Hunt of Grief,1992, Heroism, Trying To Keep Still,
The Shadow of Day, Widow, Saving Ourselves, Illness
And others
To tell the story of same kind and narration
As they mean it not,
What he says and what he means.
Abstract and reflecting, he is a poet of light and darkness,
Random descent and random reflection,
Nothing is what it seems to be
And what it seems to be is nothing,
There is nothing as that exists
And this forms the poetic base of the poet,
The vacuum writ large,
The space infinite.
Bazaar Scene, Possessions, Aftermath, Season, Still Life, June Rain,
Village Evening, The Quiet, Greeting, Raining, Cloak of White,
Defeat, Shadows, Octave, Walls, Denials, The Fear, Enterprise,
Awe, Afterward, Life, Ashes, Late, The Stories In Poetry,
Telling the tales in their own way,
What the poetic tale, what the poetic truth,
The poetry of nothingness that he writes,
Life but an absurd waiting, that he relays to.
Abstract thought, blank mood, vacant thinking, pervade
The poetic spirit of the poet,
The colours of loneliness that he sees and feels,
The toy clockwork of poetry,
What makes one wait,
A brief history of losses never to be written,
Obscure face, the blue sky hanging above his palms,
Shadows can never open their mouths
Are the things of his reckoning.
His is a poetry based on suppositions,
A lot of proposition, a lot of conjecture is therein
And the poet contradicting and contrasting,
Comparing and presenting,
Laughter always on the lookout for grief is similar to
Hardy’s happiness is but a bubble in man’s life
And Gray’s obscure destiny of village forefathers,
Childhood sitting in shadow to remember
And to see the changed appearances.
Bijay Kant Dubey
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/shadow-space-by-jayanta-mahapatra/
