Tanmoy Bhattacharjee reviews Earth Elegies- A Collection of Poems by Ajanta Paul (Published by Penprints 2023) addressing the emerging role of poetry in mapping out the ecological ruin vis-à-vis the everyday loss of human values.
Poet, critic and academician Ajanta Paul’s Earth Elegies is a collection of sixty poems of various shades and sensibilities. The title taken prima facie, the collection might seem a threnodic representation of earth and its unceasing poetry. However, as any authoritative anthology does, this particular work also stimulates our curiosity as to whether and how far the poet is interested in the earth’s accumulated store of music, melody or even melancholy. The titular apostrophe is, by no means, unconventional; still, its directness sensitizes us to examine whether and to what extent the poet’s attitude is the outcome of a genuine care for, to use her prefatory wordings, ‘a vulnerable earth reeling and receding under the impact of an aggressive and aggrandizing world’. A query naturally engenders: is the whole exercise solely a regimented pursuit of understanding the earth’s much-too-rued vulnerability? Such a speculation isn’t altogether baseless, for the poet has often peopled her compositions with apocalyptic images like ‘a wilderness’ turning into ‘deserts’:
‘A wilderness rapaciously despoiled
By the axe and fires of avarice
Creating deserts of forested climes’ (Earth Elegies 89).