Thirty Summer Poems and Conversations about a Murder\u2019, Dr Sabarna Roy\u2019s latest offering, is a slim book that can be read within a time span of two hours, however, will leave the reader with very disturbing and agonizing thoughts for a very long time.
This book is written from a personal core of agony and anxiety. It deals with depressive survival, shadows of death, darkest recesses of human psychology, loneliness, human relationships, murder, mystery, medical science, love, and hate.
For some reason the words flow out with aquiline anguish as if the author himself is drowned in a sorrowful state and by writing he is wanting to achieve catharsis of sorts. The visualizations and imagery in the poems are vivid to the point of being akin to cinematic storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u2018New Loneliness\u2019 he writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You feel tired smelling of gelatine
You lie on the dried grass bed of the cemetery looking up into the sky
Reading through the secret signals of the distant stars
In \u2018The Party\u2019 he writes:
Your body turns black under the shower
Your head explodes like Chernobyl
You feel the pain
Images of humiliation rush through your mind
You are not that high anymore<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The prose portion of the book which deals with conversations between three characters is fiercely minimalistic. Although the text of the dialogues is very, very sharp, however, the prose piece could have been more detailed to hold the palpitating tension of the events. The author revives his lady sleuth, Renuka, from \u201cAbyss\u201d though aged now over the years. The author dedicates this book to his friend, Agomoni, and on the dedication page he quotes from one of the fables of Jean de La Fontaine, \u201cA person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.\u201d
Dr Sabarna Roy writes prose and poetry in various forms since 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His first book \u201cPentacles\u201d contained five long ballads apart from a novella. His second book \u201cFrosted Glass\u201d contained a poem cycle of twenty-one poems apart from a story cycle of fourteen long-short stories. \u201cWinter Poems\u201d contained two poem cycles \u2018Winter Poems 2010\u2019 and \u2018Winter Poems 2012\u2019. In \u201cRandom Subterranean Mosaic\u201d and \u201cFractured Mosaic\u201d there were bursts of occasional poetry amongst sharp prose. In \u201cEtchings of the First Quarter of 2020\u201d there was a poem cycle \u2018Winter Poems 2020\u2019 apart from a novella on ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr Roy has revolutionized Indian post-modern poetry writing in English singularly and silently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of Dr Roy\u2019s readers contend he is a better poet than a prose writer while some others believe otherwise. In one of his interviews Dr Roy had said that he packs each of his books with some poesies and some prose for the readers to make competitive judgment about his writing skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n