Book Review by ANURADHA DAS | NT BUZZ
Poet Brian Mendonca has released his second book of poems A Peace of India, which is his way of displaying unstinting love and respect for the nation.
The myriad colours sounds and histories of India have been deftly painted through words and NT BUZZ goes on a journey with the poet on the synthesis.
Most poets are quiet people. They occupy the literary panorama softly, and gently, subtle in their commanding of attention. Theirs is a select audience tuned in to the finer messages carried on the cadence of their sensitive lyricism. This is what comes to mind when writing about poet Brian Mendonca who has published his second book of poems A Peace of India. His first book The Last Bus to Vasco was his first poetic marker.
As we sit chatting about the book and the entire birthing process – right from the first germ of an idea taking root to the final slim volume of poems – Brian says in his typical soft drawl, “It was a challenge I posed for myself after my first volume of poems The Last Bus to Vasco was published. I very deliberately chose those places that I had not been to. One thing I would do is read up a lot on the place before visiting it. The idea was to contrast the history of the place with its modernity.”
And that is when, he says, he learnt something very important – “that there is nothing very definite about inspiration”. “I have been writing for twenty years now, but this was a revelation to me. I used to think that if I set up the right conditions the inspiration for the poems would naturally follow,” says this traveller poet who found that most of his poems came spontaneously, born out of the imagery, sounds and smells of a place.
“One poem that I have called ‘Bits of Paper’ came to me in a flash as I surveyed the emptied out contents of my pocket on the train berth. Another was at the Tatanagar station as I was waiting to be picked up by a friend at midnight. A sadhu…a few tribals twining string onto sticks…and suddenly the poem was there. Jharkand is the land where new forces have come up in the form of terror groups, and couched in this is the imagery from its past – the tribals and the sadhu,” says Brian, the awe from that moment when the past and the present stood side by side still tingeing his voice.
Life is in constant flux, and this panorama of poems that traverses the Indian landscape from north to south and east to west hopes to document this change. “My first book has captured a Goa that no longer exists. I want people to read the poem once again twenty thirty years later and see if the imagery still matches,” says Brian, who credits his first book for giving him a surge in confidence that led him to A Peace of India his tribute to the synthesis of various lands, peoples and cultures that is India and which at all times received him in peace.
Published in Navhind Times, Panaji, Goa on 12 August 2011. Cover pics by Dwayne Mendonca. Artwork by Gautam Ghosh. Article source https://www.navhindtimes.in/2011/12/08/magazines/buzz/ilive-poet-transit/
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