Kedarnath Singh was a poet of the earth and sky, towns and villages. He saw the ironies of life, ups and downs, love and sorrow, and the fast-changing scene of Indian democracy challenged by new political movements. When the Naxalbari leftist movement (an armed peasant movement that started in West Bengal) rattled the country, he understood the aspirations of underprivileged people, and his writing slowly started to lean toward the left. But Kedarnath Singh always remained a poet of optimism. In his poem “Srishti Par Pahra”, he writes, “Wearing the wobbly wooden sandals of roots / it was standing before me / guarding the border, . . . a tall, huge, desiccated tree / with only a few leaves left / waving on the top. How magnificent it was to view / on the very top of a dwindling tree / the swaying of the leaves. / In a severe drought / they were there / defending the universe.” Similarly, in his poem “Grass,” he writes: “She is a gypsy / driven from all the cities in the world / now looking for its lost name and place / in the dust of your town. / . . . She is an obstinacy to rise / from anywhere, / anytime. “Srishti par pahra” was his latest publication before he breathed his last. It is comprised of many unparalleled poems and translated in to Odia under the title “Sarjanara Nireekshana “.

Places, relationships, nature, domestic experiences: these are the main sources of Manorama Biswal Mohapatra’s poems. The print plight of Shanti Niketan Tagore’s Dream-University saddens and infuriates the poet who admires its founding genious. Its dance has been stilled; devils and dragous have turned that sweet dream into a fierce nightmare. Its cry makes her listless, nostalgic about its glorious past that had initiated her into the art of poetry and music. This unrest soon grows into self-pity, she feels she is a woman in exile trying to climb up a broken ladder. The poet pays rich tribute to her mother who had first planted dreams in her: she never capsizes, never ceases to burn. There is a goddess in every mother, she says. Her decrepit village pains her as much as her house whose love and faith have given way to sadness and gloom. The poems, mostly, have an elegiac tone: yet there are moments too of hope and assurance of survival.

Prof. K. Satchidanandan

Eminent Poet & Professor of Malayalam Language

Ex-Secretary

Central Sahitya Academy

The Divine Solitudeis the English transcreation of “Aparthiba Nirjanata” by Dr. Harishchandra Behera, a celebrated voice in Odia poetry whose work moves effortlessly between myth and lived reality, devotion and dissent, intimacy and vastness. Translating these poems has been less an act of linguistic transfer and more a journey of listening-listening to silences, pauses, symbols, and the emotional undertow that carries the poem beyond words.

The poems gathered here inhabit a space where the earthly and the divine overlap: rivers remember motherhood, boats become lives, feet turn into lotuses, and solitude itself acquires a sacred resonance. Mythological figures-Rama, Ahalya, Vishwamitra, the ferryman, the flute of the Kadamba grove-are not distant icons but breathing presences, entering daily life, desire, doubt, and ethical questioning. This poetry does not merely retell myth; it interrogates it, softens it, humanizes it.

The kaleidoscopic earth and sky saturated with colours, sounds and perfume, are packed into his capsule-like poems ever glittering, humming, exuding sweet fragrance. However, one can’t help noticing an elegiac tune thrumming at the heart of the poems, of some intimacy found and lost, some moments of togetherness gone with the wind, a longing for renewal of life in love beyond time and space. Many of the poems testify to an aching heart seeking the healing balm from the benign Nature. That is why, perhaps, the poet sings with birds, yet grieves at a falling one; smiles with budding blooms; grieves at the wilting ones; rejoices at a quiet dawn propping a young sun. He too longs to offer his life to the fire of love, to lose the self to win liberation. All these speak volumes for the mind and heart that shaped the poems. Some are earthy, some skyiee, heavenly and some are exquisite fusion of both.