Notes of Silent Times : An Elegant, Unsettling Collection

Subash Singh Parajuli

Notes of Silent Times is an elegant, unsettling poetry collection that’s concerned with the significance of everyday words, meanings, and forms blending with common and natural subjects experienced by the poet with the flavor of philosophical and mythological legacies. The contradiction of subtle realities of life and fabricated lifestyle are widely collided in Mahesh Paudyal’s poetry collection,  which includes images from nature, domestic scenes, and not so faraway places that repeat shapes, colors, and objects within anyone’s mind and circumstances that are  not very deeply meditated in fast-moving lifestyle. Notes of Silent Times is self-translation of the poet in English language from Nepali, and the poems are highly appreciated and revered by all critics and reviewers that as one setting a new type of writing in poetry, known  as ‘poems in pieces’. This anthology of 108 poems was published by Brosis Publishers and Distributors from India in early 2020.

The poet has dispensed with poetic equipments and have chosen the path of brevity using free verses and un-spun rhymes. The unmetered pieces lean on their symbolism, metaphors, and juxtapositions. Images and experiences recur, like in the poem “Perspective”:

In Phewatal
Everyone saw the beautiful image of Macchapuchhre
In the same lake
There also is the reflection of a dry, old tree
Standing on the shore
But no one saw it.

Nature imagery, most often of mountains, rivers, flowers and heavenly bodies, is subverted to suggest darker forces in one part of life on the other hand they are more wonted in daily routine, tainting everything for everyone as they touch.

The poems are linked thematically, resulting into layered images, whose meanings change each time they are repeated and frequently observed, and goes deeper in meaning.  “Prospective,” a poem, sets around a lake that evokes the bright colors and textures of the landscape and raises the voice of voiceless objects which are particularly posited in the same place but are given less priority by the observer. 

Another poem  “Needle” is very symbolic and philosophical too. It that goes like this:

Should you go naked,
Then be like a needle
Look, it is stark naked
But for ages it has been silently sewing garments
To veil man’s nakedness.

Many of the entries dip into meditation with word-play to  tell about burning issues either of political scenario or social practice, phenomena of the past or recent times. Some deal with anxieties, truths, human behaviors and natural aspects,  and such poems include humanity, “Pain”, “India Gate”,  “The Ultimate War”, “Spring”, “Storm”, “Man and Butterfly”,  “Relationship” and “A War of Truth” in which unusual images are frame-worked on the basis of eastern civilization. Although this wordplay points to linguistic sensitivity, only a few pieces focus on narrative forms. They rather let in free expressions despite being a self-translation into the English language. This somehow seems to flatten the work.

Paudyal’s poems equally deal with social phenomena that are deeply rooted as taboos and social problems. especially in Nepali societies. and there is a subtle call for reforming such misunderstanding which let everyone suffer. “Caste”, a poem, is one of the most powerful and satirical ones, that calls for overcoming such misconceptions that mesmerized people in accepting such valueless hierarchy. The poem goes as under:

In a huge mirror
Time had hung at the crossroad
Our faces appeared beautiful
Though diverse they were.
None knows who shot it with a catapult
The mirror broke into innumerable pieces
And in them our faces looked countless
And mutilated too.

The poems are uniformly composed of short, enjambed lines. Some use stanzas, but none is rhymed. The overall monotony of this form dulls their novelty after the first blink in poems with the enjambment wandering in and out of linear narratives. The book’s all poems are more compelling thematic web of shifting and expanding symbolic meanings and are satirical too. 

Note of Silent Times is an elegant, unsettling poetry collection that is concerned with the significance of everyday words, meanings, and forms with lots of distinguished originality and musicality that can be felt in these prose-poems in short pieces. In totality, Notes of Silent Times is a new trend-setting anthology of short piece poems which are Paudyal’s trademark too.

[Reviewer Parajuli is a Nepali poet and educator. He has published three anthologies of poems in English: Mystic Myth, Soil on Pyre and Sympathy of Life. He lives in Kathmandu.]