Poems by Shaswati Sarkar

There’s a sequence in “So That Song Is Remembered” (Bidur, 2025) that Shaswati Sarkar, playing with the readymade phrase available as colloquial, calls ‘Sthaniyo Shangbad’ which means ‘Local news.’ The title is a playful irony – there is nothing in these short poems that can be called ‘news’, and it is this poetic intelligence that makes Sarkar’s work nothing like we are offered in the increasingly recycled idioms of contemporary Bengali poetry. Not one line in her poems seems to be related to those that precede or follow it, and yet they come together, as lines do, whether broken or blurred, in modernist paintings. The Bengali language seems to have to keep pace with Sarkar’s inventiveness, not just her magical instinct for the portmanteau, which she uses almost politically, bringing words from different cultural histories and registers together. This becomes an act of aesthetic equity as it were, where, for instance, the weaver’s loom and the priest’s sky can come together, without the necessity of a hyphen. The language of these poems is a spiritual inventory of living and thought on alluvial soil and a sky that seems to be closer here than it is elsewhere. 

These are tropical poems,…