Rivers Going Home

was conceived during the worst of times when the terrible pandemic struck and the rhythm of entire humanity came to a standstill. Fear struck and isolated from one another, some poets chose to reach out and read poetry 'Live' on Instagram to sustain one another's spirit and in solidarity.  It bore testimony to the transformative power of 'words', especially 'poetry', as a hope amidst all round death and despair. Under the aegis of Indian Novels Collective and Kitab Khana, Mumbai; brilliantly curated by poet Ashwani Kumar, 71 poets from 15 Indian languages came together, read poetry every evening over a fortnight as an effort to steer through the critical and desperate times. As a labour of love and passion, 'Rivers Going Home' got into shape, propelled by the untiring efforts of poet Ashwani Kumar, who put together these poems into a volume. With Jayant Parmar, poet-painter lending one of his outstanding works for cover and Dibyajyoti Sarma of Red River joining in to bring out this book of poems artistically; the outcome was certain to be anything but spectacular.

The anthology is dedicated to one of the best poets of our times, Mangalesh Dabral who we lost to Covid, months after he read his poems in this platform. The piously intended effort set the tone of the volume in clear terms, "(it's) not about mighty ancient  rivers, but about an extended family of small rivers, rivulets, and streams of speech, and it's experiences- each reflecting ourselves and our histories- our separate and entangled lives that flow together...", wrote Ashwani Kumar, editor of the anthology. The metaphor of 'river' as language landscapes is powerfully evoked in poems that are uniquely diverse and yet secularly unifying in its lyrical flow across the terrain of sensibilities; as poet Ashutosh Dubey writes, "This river doesn't flow into the sea/ This river is its own ocean".

And 'translations'- as "million-tongued" conversations added richness in terms of regional flavours when a poet of the stature of Jayanta Mahapatra joins in.

As they say, "poetry belongs to those who need it", in turmoil, poetry provided people with an emotional 'anchor';  as  we need more love to fight hatred, more exciting life to  confront death, more sanity to check the chaos and madness - reflections of such voices one finds abundantly in this stunning anthology. Hailed effusively by the likes of poets K. Satchidanandan, Brian Turner, and Arundhati Subramanium, these poems contain a whole array of pulsations and  resonances of lives deeply lived and variously experienced.  When 'erasure' has become a norm, poet Nabina Das shows in her poem how alphabets resist it, "Take a white page. Slowly blow/ out the black letters- some/ anyway hang by/ their cursive tendrils/ from the whiteness". Besides serving as coping mechanism, these poems do much else-they stand witness to an ever elusive present, which unless caught by the scruff would slip quietly into the dark pit of history. The only way one can freeze 'time' is by 'recording' it in whatever way possible. 

Arundhati Subramanium, in her poem bears witness to, "a woman walking back/ to her village from Telengana/ died of starvation/ in a Chhattisgarh forest ". She concludes "that we are always eleven miles away from home". Thus, poems in 'Rivers Going Home' range from the ruminative and meditative to rebellious and sensuous; from unsettling and provocative to sublime-with an acute sense of urgency.

In an age, when anything not driven by the infantile logic of commerce seem 'frivolous' and when media clamour invade our thought corridors; manufactured fantasies corrode our inner and outer lives; we need to turn inward to hear the soul speak, turning words into moral weapons. As Odia Poet Basudev Sunani blasts: "Keep the crown to yourself/ I don't want to be king/ Even if it's in a play/ I won't fight;/ even if it's a story/ that someone's family is being ruined,/ I  can't smile". Piercing words. Durga Prasad Panda's sensuous poem 'Hand' seems not all that innocent when it says "After all, it's hard to believe/ that the slender, pink skinned, petal soft hand/ that has never hurt a fly in the daylight/ could easily turn/ so beastly in the dark!" It's celebration of poetry all the way in its nuances, colours and idiosyncrasies.

At a time when the world was on the verge of turning into vast human wreckage, creative imaginations like poetry, art, music saved our sanity and reason. Even in the worst of situations (eg. holocaust) human spirit could flourish in its 'creative indulgence'. Poetry and art make life in the world a little more bearable, less lonely and still worthwhile to hang on. 'Rivers Going Home' bears ample testimony to this.