The Game called Hearts: A Review of Sea Dreams

JAYDEEP SARANGI

Sea Dreams is Bibhu Padhi’s eleventh book of poetry. Padhi’s poems have appeared in distinguished magazines throughout the English-speaking world, such as, The Poetry Review, Stand, The Rialto, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Southwest Review, The Toronto Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Bombay Review and Indian Literature. His poems have also been included in numerous premier anthologies and textbooks. Padhi is described as an honest soul-maker. He is an ardent artist of the mind and expressions. Creativity is an aroma of human heart. At times, Bibhu Padhi’s poetic pool is redolent with a hurried system of questions and answers:
“Words have ceased to arrive
at your doorsteps, as they used to.” (‘Returning’, p. 128)

For Padhi, all poems are doors of the mind. The poet shows us the steps of a ladder of time.
Time flies around these poems:
“The crows sit over yesterday’s
dead fish(.)” (‘Sea Dream’, p 15)

Poetry saves a man from moments of frustration and dejection. Mundane wishes come and go. A poet has a sensitive heart to feel all these arrivals and departures of wishes and dreams:
“Every lost thing is imagined
and wished for—“ ( ‘Sea Dream’, p. 15)

For Bibhu Padhi, only the senses are moving among the objects of senses. Thought is a mental act. The poet wants to sign in the peace accord of minds with a whirlpool of images of varying nature. Man lives with dreams: dreams for a better tomorrow. For the poet, absences stay in the midst of dreams resulting in attitudes and actions:
“The smell of salt and lime
rolls over the sand and the sky
dreams of sea rise
all about me, as I stand.” (p. 27)

Padhi’s musings are often short, compact and witty. There are some long poems in between. Some poems show the poet’s vast knowledge of life.

Poems in this collection are not just the experiences and realizations of life, the poet rather moves towards aesthetic celebration, not just physical, but spiritual. The poems are to be appreciated for their rhetoric. The poet uses a variety of linguistic devices to convey his reflections:
“Summer: I shall not
call you now, when
the erratic February
rains here.“(‘Summer, Dhenkanal’, p. 102)

Rain has a soul. For Padhi, each small rain drop sings. Rain binds myths in coastal Odisha. All leading poets of Odisha write about rain and rivers. Padhi’s poetic sensibility navigates on hearts that comes out of the rains to the sunshine to soothe his sores.

The poetic self of Bibhu Padhi generates meaning out of dry, repetitive and prosaic terrains of life’s daily acts where imagination conjures up mysteries of the heart. Most of his poems are collage of ideas effortlessly streaming from lived moments of creative pulls. Touching is knowing. Padhi is a psychological poet for whom each touch is different, more than the objects:
“Touch. You can feel how
the touched words pulsate within you.” (‘Returning’, p.129)

Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, two culturally rich towns come again and again in Padhi’s poetic canvas:
“It is noontime
in the old town.” (‘A Bird About to Fly Way’, p. 110)

Among the many talented poets of Odisha of the past and present it is an obvious fact that Padhi’s poems strike a distinct note, his poems significantly break free from the overwhelming compulsions that prudes and purists the defining routes that poetry must track to remain truly poetic. He writes in other veins and arteries,
‘This is where everything ends,
Love.” (‘Betrayed’, p. 138)

Mamang Dai, a fellow poetess from Itanagar in the North-east Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in ‘Small Towns and the River’ expresses:
“Small towns always remind me of death.
My hometown lies calmly amidst the trees (.)”
For Mamang, each small rain drop sings. For Malsawmi, ‘tiny flowers I bring adorn your crown’. Rain and rivers give the vital dose to Pablo Neruda to overcome all kinds of solitude and anxiety. Bibhu Padhi is an ardent lover of rain and rivers which bring a promise of renewed vitality in life. His aim is to achieve cleansing of the minds by purgation of pent-up emotions.

Odisha is the land of Jagannatha tradition. Jagannatha in a local legend was a tribal deity who was co-opted by Brahmin priests. The theology, rituals and nuances associated with the Jagannatha cult combine Vedic, Puranic and tantric themes. The sap of history of the land of Odisha is a long pedigree:
“Such are the turns of history
that what is forgotten by most
is what troubles the mind (.)” (‘Looking Back’, p. 92)

Introvert by nature, Padhi is a magician of words. We are puzzled to reconcile with what’s there between two ultimate pages: life and death. Padhi’s candle of poems burns slowly, very slowly.

---

---

---