Review: Frontier Lyrics: A collection of poems by Ramakanta Rath

Ramakanta Rath believes in poetry as music for survival-rising and ebbing being ineluctable part of it, says K.K.Srivastava in this review.

Frontier Lyrics
A collection of poems
Author- Ramakanta Rath
Publisher-AuthorsPress, New Delhi
Price-Rs 195/ US$ 10; Pages- 110/Published-2014

The world of poetry is a kaleidoscopic world. Visiting poets in different guises, it is full of dichotomies, pleasures and perils, love and hatred, perceivable areas of darkness and hidden areas of illumination, but always enlightening bringing to the fore the fugacious potential of  ideas and words. The onus of exploring that potential rests with the poets. While dilating his statement, “Poetry is the most highly organized form of intellectual activity” T.S. Eliot in his essay ‘The Perfect Critic’ draws a distinction between what he refers to as “appreciation” and “intellectual criticism” the two psychological faculties and their inevitable interplay with the perceptions that he feels don’t “accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure and” a review “is the statement in language of his structure….”.  A poem is the most abstract art with all dramatics inside the poem represented by dynamics of symbols and metaphors. Strangeness makes the texture of life of poets forming the warp and the woof of what we call poetry. Seen in aforementioned context, a reviewer’s work, oftentimes epitomizes more doubts than what it dispels but it hardly deters him as this is precisely one of the principal objectives of a review. Reviewers transport the work of poets to the readers and in a limited way cause obscurity to melt away as history crawls along with time.