Review of Subhransu Maitra’s Dark Harvest

Reviewer: Nishi Pulugurtha

Rehor Press, 2025, Hyderabad, Rs. 200/-

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Translator, author and poet, Subhranshu Maitra’s latest volume of poems, Dark Harvest, is a collection of 90 poems that speak of grief and loss, of people and places, of cherished memories and lingering moments. “A Brief Interlude in the Grand Programme of Providence” is an introduction to the poet that weaves in time and important events to frame the poet’s own life event –

Man sets foot on the moon

This versifier sets foot in the portal of

                                    Presidency College, Kolkata

The short poem goes on to speak of politics as well. “As You Grow Old” reveals an aging soul trying to deal with the changes around–

As you grow old,

there come moments

when the familiar bubble you live in

begins to look more like a shriveled husk

Each of the images in this short poem reveal aging and all what it entails with a great sense of poignancy.

            The passing of time, the changes wrought in the world around, is seen in many poems in the collection. In “Splendour and Doom,” the poet writes –

I am passing by like the rest.

Soon it will be gone.

“What I would say to her If I ran into her now” also voices a similar sentiment –

Yet there is an inscrutable yearning

in growing old like rout and retreat

and envying your lovely, smouldering ageing.

            The natural world is an important presence in the poems in the volume. At times calm, at time sombre, at times ephemeral, it is the source of several images that the poet uses as he paints the canvas of life. In “Cry for Rain,” the “sickleblade moon” is a recurrent image –

Sickle blade moon of unmourning splendour.

The rain clouds will not speak after this route.

The brilliant blossoms of the Radhachura tree vividly colour “Alliance for Song” –

the yellow blossoms cascading down the dense green

large foliage canopy – sustaining the ancient song

that both sunlight and rain sing intermittently

in Kolkata at this time.

            The city of Kolkata is a perceptible presence in several of the poems in the volume. In its blooms, its politics, its places and the people who are so much a part of it. “The Jadabpur Crossing” is one such poem, where the place and its associations, of memory and time, intrinsically coalesce.

each face unique, yet belongs in the galactic stream,

snaking queues waiting for bus,

the last cigarette, the last cup of tea,

quick a tete-a-tete

“Overture to City 2” uses the musical metaphor to speak of the city that rolls on with its

ebb and replenishing flow,

the concurrence of flesh and bone,

the pirouetting foot lifting, kissing the knee,

spinning its way past the map, staff,

compass, sword and gun . . .

“Bhairabi” is a very small poem that once again uses the reference of music, the raag Bhairabi that wafts in to bring in memories – “When you were singing the raga in the morning.”

            There are poems in the volume addressed to eminent personalities, to Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, to the poet Sankha Ghosh, poems which wonderfully craft ideas that each of these personalities worked and strove for to speak of the times that we live in. The present is always an important part of Maitra’s poems even when he is looking back, when memories crowd. In “To Migrant Workers” one can hear the sensitive poet recall the condition of the migrant workers left in the lurch, of those long walks that at times never made it to the destination. There is an anger in the poem in the way in which it begins – “Guys, you are a nuisance.” The poet as activist is seen in “Gravaitas” where he voices his anguish at the rape and murder of a young girl in Hathras. Maitra’s use of irony in the poem reveals his anger. This ironic strand tone is seen in several other poems as well.

Dark Harvest reveals a sensitive poet’s response to a rapidly changing world.  It is an ode to life in its myriad facets that flows on with pauses and stops intervening at times. Written in a variety of styles and forms, the poems create a tapestry of lived experiences.

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