Sonnet Mondal바카라�s An Afternoon In My Mind - A Book Of Million Moments

Moments slip by so fast before we can register them, time hurtling us toward the future, the past flashing now and then while we are speeding ahead. Sonnet Mondal captures many of the passing moments of his life in his volume, so we get glimpses of the poet바카라�s universe in the vignettes of image-events in his immediate environment or in his chambers of memories. The poems, mostly set into three- line stanzas or free verse couplets, offer us scenes, musings, and recollections. Similes, metaphors, imagery, and synecdoche abound in this volume. In the title poem, Mondal writes about his recollection of fishing with his relatives, 

The fish we caught that day
still flutter in my mind.
The pond must be
keeping our reflections safe바카라�
somewhere in its water
captured by the late afternoon light.

We are captivated by water retaining the memory of the family in this meditative pursuit, light being the photographic material aiding it. Mondal animates nature, the streets, and ordinary objects, such that they too are imbued with the impressions of the speakers or characters in the poems. When he describes the city바카라�s lockdown during the Covid pandemic, nature reflects the dreariness of the human illness: 바카라�Caged, wingless, a bird waits / for the last dusk;바카라� streets are forsaken, as are the vehicles without passengers: 바카라�a forsaken boatman/rows for food in the twilight.바카라� Cumulative auditory images in 바카라�Lockdown바카라� bring out the imposed silence during the lockdown. All the poet hears are the variety of sounds accentuated by the silence: muted notes of TV and distant music, pen바카라�s scratch on paper, a dog바카라�s howl, and insect buzz, all of which produce 바카라�a symphony of the almost quiet.바카라� 

Mondal offers us a lesson from nature that helps him perceive loss. He reflects:

Those dewdrops바카라� 
how they shine 
every morning 
and then die. 
How are they any different 
from those insects flying 
every night to die 
when I wake up!

The dewdrop and the insect make the world beautiful, but even if their lives are momentary, they continue to lend their beauty. The dewdrop and the insect바카라�they just are, a lesson in being, without the heaviness of the imminent end of life. 

Longing, flashes of nostalgia, the beauty of the present, the gorgeousness of the natural world, are all expressed through rich imagery and metaphors. Witness the soaring of the poet바카라�s imagination in 바카라�Thoughts on a Highway:바카라� 

If I could travel like the smoke from a chimney, 
I would have had no moments 
but an unending void all around 
and a late moon subsiding 
in soul-stretched dawn.

We get a sense of the human being as part of the void, what Buddhists call, nothingness. That our minds can imagine this, is a gift, that relieves us from feeling bound to time, even though, paradoxically the poet is trying to capture the moments of his swiftly passing life: 

If there were stories waiting to be told 
they died with their longing to be heard.

Mondal바카라�s poems have the ease of Zen paintings. Although some poems could do with editing the over writing of similes and mixed metaphors which mask the direction of the poem, overall Mondal uses language cleverly to paint a few strokes for us to fill in the substance. Witness his use of synecdoche in 바카라�What바카라�s the Judgment:바카라� the man who is sniggered at for his work of climbing into the manholes and drains of the city is the unfinished story of millions who do the work in the dregs of urban living to keep the cities running. The poem ends with 바카라�Who are we to this man?바카라� Our story in the mind of this man is the unsaid that burns our curiosity바카라�it is a judgment that is not articulated but is evident to the one who is aware.

An Afternoon in my Mind is not just an afternoon, but millions of moments that make up years of a singular life and an accumulation of lives of humans and nature alike.

(Pramila Venkateswaran, is the poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15) and co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival. She is the author of The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018) and many other books of poetry.)