Mansi Karna
Poet Subash S. Parajuli’s third book, Symphony of Life published by Brosis Publishers and Distributors in August 2019 is an observation of minute aspects of life expressed beautifully. The collection offers such in depth insights into human’s love life, his relation to nature, his existential and nihilistic approaches to life that it seems to have sprung from the want to pour down the emotions, curiosity, desires and analysis of life’s little lessons expanded so much in intensity as to become difficult to the kept within the boundaries of the heart. The content component of this book offers a varying degree of sentiments making it be a book for people of all the age groups from an adolescent to a septuagenarian. A collection of 26 Goyoshish, 38 My kinds of Haikus and 138 free verse poems, this collection extracts its content from nature, seasons, art, emotions, state of dwelling, self awareness, truth, philosophy, observation, situations, human character, rituals, places and other minutely richer aspects of life. Being a collection of over two hundred poems written on several delicate subjects, the poet was erudite in choosing a title which speaks for all the poems inside. The title of the collection is a reflection of the aspects of life that contribute towards it being music and the poems inside contribute towards such aspect of life.
The poems in this book are deep and offer an opportunity to take short breaths and enter the chamber of poet’s muse. Despite some poems that look like deals, for instance in ‘Be like a solitary bird’ where the lines ‘If you want to get my presence with you, be like a solitary bird’ presents the poet as a seemingly narcissist, the simple and mostly plain language in the poems is subtle even when the content is rigidly existential, extremely philosophical emotional hazards.
Parajuli’s expertise at naming his poems enigmatically and somehow paradoxically as is the case with Á voice is an evil,’ An eye and I, ‘Your are poesy, ‘A tree doesn’t walk,’ ‘Heaven is in coma, ‘Seeing is not believing, ‘We all are beggar, ‘False Truth,’ and so on give the readers a will to read more of the poems from the collection unless they are done with almost 90% of them. This kind of enigmatic topics in poetry is fascinating as it permits poems to do several things at a time, from inquiring the realm around us to challenging and criticizing it and yet enjoy it the way it is. It lets the readers interpret the poems the way they would like to and yet not go away from the poet’s interpretation of it. The poet hires both the optimistic and pessimistic moods to write as can be seen in the poems. For instance, appreciators can refer to ‘Heaven is in coma’ to see what happens when peace and bad act quarrel for bad act to get ultimately victorious and ‘Fragrance of Asia’ to find out the positive possibilities in each of the Asian countries.
In ‘An eye and I,’ the poet makes use of assonance throughout the poem creating music appropriate to the theme of the poem. Lines like ‘Cunning shepherd is sleeping on the bed sheets of democracy’ in ‘One day in Kantipur Nagari’, ‘Whenever I am hungry, they don’t feed, in ‘Natures Law’ and ‘Despite she has astounding beauty, compared as slot, she hardly resists to stand tall in the mass of stout’ in ‘Alike a Vase’ demonstrates Parajuli’s excellent use of Poetry to demonstrate the bitterness of society in the light of utilitarian practicality through seemingly straight expressions. Parajruli applies Alliteration in every single line of the poem in An Ode to Alphabet’ where every alphabet from A to Z get to play their part sequentially in the lines that follow.
The poem ‘Amen’ employs a paradoxically stipulated wordplay of savior and destroyer where the condition of becoming assigns the time either as destroyer or savior.
Most of the poems are written in present tense deriving a statement of universal nature. However, we find it has been possible for desires, possibilities and wants to blend and create new flows. Despite richer dives into life’s assets, this collection suffers from lack of intensive editing in grammatical parts. Most of the poems in the collection are free-verse with varying degree of lines and rhyme schemes in each of them It is as if the poet is too busy with the extensive content of his poems that grammar and world poetry pattern becomes subsidiary. . A lover of rhymes may find it difficult at times to read it with rhythm that a rhyming poem may provide as rhymes have not ben the primary or even the secondary focus of the poem. All the poems in the collection are one stanza poems with very few exceptions. Even so, the flows of the poems are rarely obstructed because of these and the poet has been able to create his own space in the poetry world.
This publication records and makes perceptible the toil of a reflective mind, the intellect of a logical thinker, and the emotions of a sensitive heart for readers attempting to find fulfillment amid the irony laid everywhere in day to day life. Some of the poems work to redirect sensitivity. Even the poems that look like self-centered are not simply self- centered but self-aware, full of inherent naivety and child-like innocence. Glory is to be bestowed to Parajuli for presenting spirited selections of poetry for readers who might not otherwise have had such an opportunity in the less flourished English Poetry Scene among Nepalese people. While it has considerable amount of poetic content in it, it is to be appreciated for the amount of lateral thinking it puts among the general public. The collection is powerful and insightful in its totality. It explores several sides of human nature in the light of his power to emote to various situations with a voice that is visible throughout the collection. This voice is the essence of the collection and it ends the collection with a note that speaks how it is to write a poem.