Book Review: For the Hope of Spring- hybrid poems by Shamayita Sen

Abhipsa Chakraborty reviews Shamayita Sen’s For the hope of spring: Hybrid Poems (Published by Hawakal Publishers, Dec 2020) emphasizing how these poems ponder different kinds of love that intersect and empower each other.

• Title: for the hope of spring: Hybrid Poems
• Author: Shamayita Sen
• Publisher: Hawakal Publishers, Calcutta and New Delhi, India. 
• Date of publication: Dec, 2020

     Shamayita Sen’s debut collection of poems for the hope of spring takes you on an intimate journey through her inquisitive engagement with her surroundings, people, and her medium of expression, language itself. Opening her book with an introductory statement, ‘From Scribbling Notes to Publishing Poetry’, Sen, a 31year old PhD scholar at Delhi University, describes in brief the genesis of her poetic craft. Composed mostly in the year of the pandemic, Sen’s poems explore the deep nurturing power of creative language in a time when man’s relation with the social link has been significantly altered by limited access to spaces and community. What language then enables is a definitive looking inward, an access to the self, its deep recesses and as yet unexplored and unresolved complexities, as much as its surprising intensities.

     The structural composition of the anthology is dictated by a thematic movement from a mode of defiance and personal grief to a final promise of reparative healing. The form in which these three themes—“On Dissent; Grief and Other People; Love, Healing, etc”—are strung together is described by Sen as a musical score. The suggested formal harmony between them is attended by a merging of the personal and the political, two polarized but not so separate realms that act upon the poetic consciousness breathing through the book.