Book Review: Clamour for a Handful of Rice by Sonnet Mondal
5 min read
Jonaki Ray reviews Clamour for a Handful of Rice by Sonnet Mondal (Copper Coin, 2024)
Clamour for a Handful of Rice, the latest poetry collection of author, literary curator, and editor Sonnet Mondal, deals with the themes of loss, war, survival, and hope. The poems in this book are in keeping with his previous work that focused on the many inequities and injustices faced by those we consider voiceless and the resilience that persists within them. The wars and daily life battles both in India and the world, and their impact on nature and the fabric of a society, are highlights of this collection, not to mention topical to the current times. To the Children of Gaza, for instance, weaves in climate change with the deaths of innocent children:
As we went to the balcony to get fresh air
the wind carrying the smell of rain stopped.
Wasn’t that the sound of wind
I heard from inside my room?
Or have too many parents with their dead children
come out today?
Similarly, in Whiteness, the feathery beauty of the Kash grass, which heralds the arrival of autumn and festivals in Bengal and turns the landscape white, is compared to the shrouds that have covered the horizon now.
In Bengal the sky appears white
and so do the birds and flowers during Durga Puja.
The kash flowers bring a whiteness
around us—much like flying doves.
These days an unusual whiteness
besieges the sky.
The loud hush of shrouds
and rubble dust make even the winds appear white.
The changes, as seen through the eyes of a child who has lived through war is described best by Mondal in concise poems such as Hunger:
When I was younger
a flying aircraft was a wonder.
Then came the war jets
and now wonder is trapped inside
a loaf of charred bread.
And in poems like Moments That Change that take the rituals and changes in lives in the Indian subcontinent:
Those Durga Puja and Kali Puja moments
were precious.
It was a joy
to wait for the festivals
and burst crackers
to dance during the immersion ceremony
while watching others rejoice
to get soaked in the first rain of Shravan
after a sweltering summer.
But that wait no longer matters.
Daily visual of bombs exploding
on the television have rendered it useless.
Only who bombed whom matters now.
The impact on the innocent, especially the children who manage to survive, despite facing immeasurable hardships, is woven throughout the poems using evocative imagery. Consider the lines from the poem, Restraint:
What do those who survive hunger
think of love?
With empty stomachs and begging hands
why do they still smile
near car windows?
Similarly, in Bazaar Children, Mondal writes about the children seen behind the counters or street-side stalls helping their parents eke out a living, a common scene in many Indian cities, while foregoing the opportunities that other privileged children have.
A few teenagers and kids help their parents
sell meat, fish and vegetables
while watching the faces
of school-bound children.
The fact that this results in a hunger for a better life and not just survival is brought out later in the poem.
…An anchor rooted in the riverbed of hunger
has bound their desires.
The boat must have enough food
to sail before nightfall.
A moving poem that depicts both the lives of homeless children and their representation as icons of poverty and objects of curiosity, is through the poem Exhibit of the Unfed:
The child in the frame has no name—
just shadowed ribs
dust in his eyes
and the kind of silence
that makes museum halls feel loud.
He died waiting
beneath a roof too broken
to deserve the name
where the wind asked after his health
more often than any man did…
Now he lives
in oil and pigment
in a gallery where people
whisper reverently
as if hunger were sacred…
Despite the heaviness of these themes, there is also a philosophical detachment about the persistence of nature, as described in Ceasefire:
Ceasefires rise
like green whispers—
soft shoots piercing scorched soil,
promises made
in the hush between gunfire…
Beneath
the grassroots thicken—
wrapping themselves
around shattered bones
and rusted bullet shells…
And ultimately, we are reminded again of humans surviving the unthinkable, and life going on, and the resulting glimmers of hope, as towards the end of the poem, Whiteness
But the whiteness of kash flowers must cover the earth
and the sound of dhaks must get louder than the bombs.
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About the Reviewer
Jonaki Ray was educated in India (Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur) and the USA (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). A scientist by education and training, she is now a poet, writer, and editor in New Delhi. Her work has been published in Poetry, Poetry Wales, The Rumpus, Indian Literature, and elsewhere.
About the Book
In Clamour for Handful of Rice, Sonnet Mondal’s poems are born out of hunger, a hunger for peace, a hunger for documentation, and a hunger that calls back our ghosts. It is a book of full-bodied poems that burn into your consciousness and conscience, and thus stand out against the common run of intellectual, technical poems. Elegant and clear-sighted, aphoristic and incisive, it is a book driven by distinct and memorable imagery.
About the Author
Sonnet Mondal is an Indian poet and editor. His nine books of poetry include An Afternoon in My Mind, Karmic Chanting and Lautati Dopaheren. He has read as an invited poet at literary festivals in the USA, Macedonia, Ireland, Turkey, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, France, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Hungary, Madagascar, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Colombia, South Africa, and Slovakia. He was the guest of honour at Les Journées Poët Poët international festival, France, in 2025. His writings have appeared in publications across Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Sonnet edits Verseville and the Indian section of Lyrikline (Haus für Poesie, Berlin). He is the founder director of Chair Poetry Evenings: Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival and has served as a guest editor for Words Without Borders. His works have appeared in over twenty languages.
About Author
