Jaydeep Sarangi has always been a prolific poet; Faithfully I Wait, is his sixth poetry collection. Sarangi lays open his soul in this collection of poems. Reading through the catalogue of his works would enlighten a reader of Sarangi’s oeuvre—a long list of collections, edited anthologies, translations and critiques. Be it poetry as an art form, translation, anthology or critique, this poet is bound to the genre of verse. The collection is sequential, with the wordplay on ‘faithful’ or ‘faithfully’ functioning as a motif, reinforcing Sarangi’s faith in poetry. There is a strong autobiographical thread and a concurrent temporality in this collection; recollections of the past, living memories, visions of the future and commitments of the present are all wrapped up faithfully in verse. The poems explore moments, revelations, premonitions, and form fragments of a holistic thought process that defines the essence of verse. In the Preface, Sarangi says, ‘Poetry is a holy and beautiful dream. It is a dream for freedom; total freedom. I want to be a small part of this dream.’ The collection unfolds like a journey, a rite of passage through the poet’s world, his beliefs, his value systems and his enduring love of verse. The poet draws the reader into his verse, in a metanarrative of word and image:
Words move towards words
Image after image,
picture after picture.
(Diary of a Scribbler)
The collection has a subtitle—‘Poems on Rain, Thunder and Lightning at Jhargram and Beyond’. The book opens nostalgically with ‘Love and Longing at Jhargram’, which is a tribute to the poet’s birthplace, the forest enclosed town of Jhargram, replete with temples, palaces and the dreams of the poet’s ancestors: