Dustin Pickering reviews Etesian::Barahmasi by Amit Sankar Saha (Penprints, 2024) calling it unity within decimation.
Contemporary poetry often takes a stance on social and political issues and has throughout history. Even the Romantics had a social vision. However, they also had an aesthetic applied to the power of imagination. Etesian::Barahmasi is a new release by scholar and poet Amit Shankar Saha. These poems skillfully adapt aesthetics to this age of activism. Etesian winds are sometimes symbolic of longing and separation. Examples include T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Keats’s “Endymion”. In Eliot’s poem, the winds suggest dryness and lack of meaning and are not directly mentioned; yet, Keats’s poem offers the lines “…and the Etesian breezes / Were whispering secrets to the trees” implying Nature’s own use of aesthetic language. In Eliot’s poem, meaning and order is restored by the rains and the mantra “Shantih.” In Keats’s long poem, meaning undergoes symbolic transformations. The collection is separated into months for both the Hindu and Gregorian calendars. This gives the reader a sense of the passage of time.