Coalescing the Past, Present and ‘Future Discontinuous’
Amrita Ajay
CODA: SELECTED POETRY by By Rupendra Guha Majumdar Silver Bow Publishing, New Westminster, British Columbia, 2022, 80 pp., $23.95
August 2024, volume 48, No 8

Coda is Rupendra Guha Majumdar’s fifth volume of poetry in English. After his last award-winning poetry collection, The Hiroshima Clock (1990), the present volume of carefully chosen forty poems has appeared after a gap of thirty-two years, which says as much about the poet’s meditative journey as about the poems themselves. Like his famous Indian-American contemporary, Agha Shahid Ali, Majumdar’s first poetry collection, Blunderbuss, appeared in 1971 and was lauded for its ‘greater command over language’ and ‘wider range of subject’ than the emotionally intense and lofty Ali. The comparison is notable, in retrospect, for it throws light on a lifetime of different poetic journeys they both undertook. More interestingly, much of what was said over half a century ago about Majumdar’s early poetry, holds true for his latest work—the range of subjects remains vast, meandering through literal and metaphorical places of the poet’s travels, and the style remains light-hearted yet deployed with a combination of showmanship and control.

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