An assured and powerful collection of articulated mourning and controlled rage for those silenced in acts of conflict. Debasis Mukhopadhyay exhumes the shadowlands and places the lives that cast them firmly into the light to be witnessed as they should through testaments of poetry. What impressed me most about these poems was the courage to experiment different forms through a stark mnemonic style of vivid imagery and a much-needed social conscience for these dark times. An impressive and courageous suite of poems and prose by a writer who has a strong ability to blend narrative into form so the poems are felt raw and all the harder hitting for it.
–Antony Owen, author of Margaret Thatcher’s Museum
The poems in Debasis Mukhopadhyay’s new chapbook, kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context, seamlessly interweave the most apparently irreconcilable materials of contemporary poetry: the horror of global injustice with the improbable persistence of beauty. These powerful poems manage to address a reality in which the continuing reign of bombs, shrapnel, bullets, and drones, coexists with the inspiration of Lorca, Ginsberg, Kafka, Beckett, and Van Gogh, beetroots and hummingbirds, moonlight and music. Braided into the relentless horror of Mukhopadhyay’s blunt and inescapable images is an ethereal lyricism in which “the night is your wool of time your doom your womb of lilac . . . hankering for the warm breath of the stars / through the rips of a sultry sky.” Ultimately, it is the demonstrated persistence of this beauty which assures the reader of this chapbook that somehow, we still “have a right to be optimistic about the world.”
–Susan Lewis, editor and publisher of Posit, author of Heisenberg’s Salon and This Visit
In this collection, Debasis Mukhopadhyay takes us inside bodies—bones, blood, skulls, chests—sometimes figuratively, but more often literally with bullets and bombs, coffins and graves. Mukhopadhyay invokes Godot and Van Gogh as he uses surreal image-scapes to examine violence around the globe, from historical events in Cuba, Spain, and Germany to present-day violence in Syria, Pakistan, and the United States. Mukhopadhyay writes, “i could see History was wrought beneath the frippery of dovetailed blueprints of gratuitous violence,” but even so, he also writes, “yes i have a right to be optimistic about the world.”
–Katie Manning, Author of Tasty Other and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman
Sudeep Adhikari –
Debasis Mukhopadhyay’s “kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context” takes you to an intense gliding sort of experience in a different continuum, guaranteed; you can connect easy with its homely surrealism, and the very refined/rarefied imagery which leaves an indelible mark on your mind. And there is this very Janus like feel to his works: the two faces of Abstract and the Immediate, the Sublime and the Ordinary, which will leave you hauntingly high, making you turn the pages for more. One of the most subtle aspects of his poetics is; the nicely experimented forms in expression, which holds duality of “experience and its expression” in an organic unity of a continuous whole.
“still buried in the foxholes” is one of my favorites from the collection, where he writes:
“/ your hairline / the mended hem around your tabula rasa
curling up in the final bluing /”
Here the writer starts with a mundane reference, but his experience swells like a wave, and proliferates deeper recess of his soul to create a stunning abstraction, nothing less stimulating than a painting or a song.
And the prolific turbulence within “Lorca’s body will never be found”, where an array of emotions is on display; feeding on each other through a magnificent non-linearity, to yield an unchanging pattern of haunting beatitude. Here are the few lines from the poem,
i have never lifted my head from the lullabies / to hear the
cowbells the gypsy bells the queer bells the refugee bells / are you
ready / the gong now swirling aroar through the synaptic cleft in
my rodent brain / amen i said rising from the muddy banks of
a fiction of puritanical discretion / pressing creases into Donald
Trump’s cloak
which reminds me of a mathematical object called Lorenz Attractor, a highly ordered pattern dictated by chaotic boundary conditions.
I remember reading “a zebra I want to write a zebra” (one of the poems in the book) few months back in a literary magazine, and when I read it again in the book, I realized that poem is permanently etched on my sub-conscious. And that is the prowess and greatness of Mr. Mukhopadhyay’s poetry; a highly original contemporary literary voice, which has found it debut outlet in the form of “kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context” through Finishing Line Press for us to savor.
724indir –
well done
saxy chat room –
You are a great writer thank you.