Harsimran Kaur ON Mar 12, 2024, IN Book Review, Melancholy, Maybe by Jiel Narvekar
Rating: 4/5
The idiosyncratic styling of the mind is like a hedgerow where a plethora of emotions and virtues take shape. They are often violated with an over whelming impulse to steer ahead in propriety or perhaps sometimes find an impulsion to take a righteous course.
How often these emotions have betrayed us? Hasn’t the impressionistic-self been a cause of indiscernible distress? I wouldn’t mind riding high on my perceptions if I realize that true happiness lies within.
Considering a thought provoking poetry from the book, ‘Melancholy, Maybe’, If Eurydice had adamantly pursued his journey without looking back, Orpheus, his beloved would not have saddled back to oblivion; a concern so nonchalantly turning into despair. We all carry such tendencies like Eurydice. The question is how long we would like to carry on if our assessment of ‘truth’ and ‘false’ is so weak.
Many such tales and tessellated fragments of life have been poetically defined by Jiel Narvekar in her latest book of poetry ‘Melancholy Maybe’. The proscriptive war shapes our disgruntlements; so sentient in our mind but the nearness to it is disrupted in desultory. It’s not always the rebellion on the ground but in attitude too! Ask the teenagers? What do we call them- dilettante? Or dogged in their persual to get skeletons out of their cupboards?
Aren’t all these emotions so ingenious and inclusive? And have been so impassionately captured by the poet. The sonorous arabesques of her poetry reflect not only how a human mind perceive things but also questions the evanescence of life and the pirouette eccentricities.
We are then rendered to think is it the mind of the naive or a perpetual impulse to create a fine distinction between the ‘Truth’ and what is not? The prescriptive can always fall as discretion, and what if it goes wrong?
These paradoxes live with us -don’t they? The poems in the book reveal that the mind has propensity to be loved, be defiant to the implausible and carries the indomitable spirit to keep the past behind and make new memories. For example, the color ‘Red’ in exuberance has the ability to defy the odds, and the poetry on ‘curly tales’ exhibits the intertwined desire to be fondly acceptable.
My favourite, though is the ‘Child gives birth to a Mother’ that encapsulates the beautiful journey of giving birth to new emotions and sentiments. A mother is a ‘Hero’ too!—‘let never the hero die in you’. It’s the compulsion that lives imperceptibly inside you to conquer what lies irrepressible. ‘Hero’—an impassioned poetry that walks on your heart!
TAKE AWAY
All these complex emotions in life beat the drum of our insanity. We interpret them, rejoice in their turbulence and sometimes give up to the intrudence of an ill disposed faculty. But all this still remains with us -in dribs and drabs. A feeling of melancholy finds a way to settle in our nerves reminding us that every ecstasy and despondency is ephemeral.
Heart touching poetry…