Book: Some Twenty Miles Away, Reviewed by Tapashi Chakraborty

Book Review by Tapashi Chakraborty of the poetry collection  

Some Twenty Miles Away composed by poet Binay Laha 

Some Twenty Miles Away by Binay Laha is a trip down the path of life enriched in flavors of life, love, failures, and rising over it. The book compiling several poems written in series is sectioned into three individual parts: Some Twenty Miles Away, Spring on the Bank of Kulik and Sin, virtue and whine, along with a forward written by Bhaskar Roy Barman, eminent English author from the state of Tripura and critical blurbs at the back cover by renowned authors and critics from different parts of within and outside India. The author has dedicated this vast saga of poems to his belated father, Sannyasi Laha. The first section comprising 65 poems, the bulky one, records the anguish of an ever-observant eye and a throbbing heart to the flavor and foul that life has to offer.

As in poem no 64 records, ‘Is this life? /we cannot but cry at dark. /Amidst fog when the sun speaks to my ear i blow my eyes to preen the green.’ Also, in poem no 54,’They hope and die and stand to tie/Missiles burnt the lives of those spies/They leave Berlin and Jerusalem. /They leave Israel and their Palestine.’ Indeed, it is one man’s journey through the motion of acceptance post several resistances of early rawness of vision, an illumination and unveiling of the power of a creative mind as his lines echo: —‘A self-proclaimed God I exclaim/A self-satisfied country, I hope’.

The poet represents himself as a hardcore romantic in terms of living and accepting defeats in all spheres of life. He believes, despite the doomed circumstances all around, life is to be loved, lived and tasted in full, ‘All we seek the life like a heaven have no match than before we call it a death.’

How we see that grief has valor of beauty when fate is chosen with complete surrender, ‘The lone mother and her daughter offers a rose to the sword/Forget it, it is an ancient tale of love. ‘At times the lines of poetry are such in spontaneous flow, the urge of inner meaning turns secondary to its appreciation,’ Away from my dreams i call my soul became an unfortunate death. I die but cannot die for i fly beside your walk. ‘In his own words, the poet,” became a muse to become a poem” through such contemplative phrases,’ Hope and migration live together.’ In lucid manner of presentation, the simplicity of language the local references, subjective utterance transcends the limits of personal to turn into form of universal, of the collectives which turn out to be the real appeal of the poems of this part. This continue s in a more mature and flowy form in the second part of the poems’ collection,

‘Clouds, rain and wind keep kulik’s birds ‘passports and visas.’ In this section, the poetries are longer in form, vivid in pictorial details and rhythmic grandeur.  Even the psyche of poet is awake to the perils of technological boom in the form of A.I, ‘…revolves around your body, conversation and desire. /What you want to see is exactly what appears on the screen of Facebook or YouTube.’ The last part, the smallest of the three sections covers mostly poems concerning moments of epiphany and poets unabashed reaction to them. There are so many lines and stanzas here that the readers will feel compelled to take pause to ponder over. Some Twenty Miles Away is a poet’s overwhelming journey of reaching to the point self- realization where the conflict of life mellows down to the path of wisdom, joy and inner beauty of living through them, winning or losing becomes irrelevant.

Name of the Book :Some Twenty Miles Away

Author :Binay Laha

Publisher :Authorpress,New Delhi
Total Page :115
Year of publication :2023
Price . 295 rs

Reviewer :
Tapashi Chakraborty

The book reviewer is Indian poet and critic. She can be reached at [email protected]

Photo of the Reviewer (Tapashi Chakraborty)

Author and Poet Binay Laha