HYDERABAD: Poet Deeptesh Sen’s collection ‘House of Song’ is a handbook of melodies. You open the book and songbirds shake their wings; it’s their rhythm which creates the house where the poet releases these tiny creatures to fly in the vacant spaces between giant windows that overlook the streets of Calcutta sinking and rising. What keeps this momentum active is the constant motion of images which fill up the silence of the house and turn it into a house of songs, of celebrations, of disappointments, of bonds that existed vapour-like. Yet, the book celebrates the co-existence of what lacks and what persists offering multiple ways to the reader to refurbish what lies hollow within him.
The poet inhabits this house of song with absenteeism. Interestingly, this absence is not ghastly. It’s a constant search of what’s gone by. The longing becomes the focal point of words in short, clipped lines arranged beautifully in the title poem which talk about rhapsody, Cezanne and soft December dawn bringing into focus the beautiful shadows left behind. There’s a sense of illuminated beauty in loss which the poet has tenderly captured through absent ragas, paintings wrapped in misty mornings. This is where Deeptesh as a poet succeeds. The yearning lingers in lines like:
Where did we not meet?
We carried everywhere your house of song.
The saga of nostalgia continues in other poems with the transmogrified forms. The poem ‘Absence’ can be called the climax in the collection as the poet writes:
Her hair was woven with sunshine,
you always buried her naked in your memory.
The poet unfolds the delicate layers of a relationship broken long ago. But he holds the wreckage sacred, closer to his heart, tries to create a small boat through the think planks and sail across the horizon where no artifice can disrupt the symphony of a heart. He carries these shadows to ghost towns where one encounters cities that have migrated to boulevards that breathe with them.
The cosmopolitan gloom tries finding the rupture within the psyche and ends up discovering its own psychedelic structure. In the poem ‘Lost Cities’ he takes lilies as the metaphors for cities sleeping beneath the skin.
He establishes the lost relations between the denizens and the cityscape which exhale each other in a way which is akin to devouring, almost like lovers. This collection explores more than just nostalgia, relationships and urban melancholia, it is a book to be read when the reader finds the earth slipping away from his feet. The words hook deep offering a ground to stand on and observe the transmogrification around.
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