Azam reviews Dr Santosh Bakaya’s “Sunset in a Cup,” a collection of 78 poems that employs vivid imagery and insightful metaphors exclusively for Different Truths.

The starburst of sophisticated sensory images in Dr Santosh Bakaya’s collection of seventy-eight poems, Sunset in a Cup, offers an epicurean feast of the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile, uninhibitedly flirting with the senses. Emily Dickinson’s poem inspires the title, and Santosh Bakaya’s introductory prose is poetical. She retrieves and owns Dickinson’s imagery, elevating it to another dimension with laudable control over each thematic pearl, strung with passion. A collection of seventy-eight previously published poems, now consolidated in a single volume for justified impact and pleasure.

Emily Dickinson’s cup had sunset in it. Santosh’s cup runneth over into the saucer without an overflow on her refined embroidery.

Bakaya deploys imagery to craft similes and generate metaphors to tease the intellect, bringing perception into focus over the mimesis of visual reality. She is able to effortlessly identify and retrieve components of imagery and bind their similitude to enrich the reader’s perception with one image blending into another to achieve continuous enhancement. In each poem, this sequence synthesises into a coherent whole, articulating Santosh Bakaya’s perception of beauty and reality, humankind and nature, time and space, life and death.

Bakaya crosses Emily Dickinson’s portal of the setting sun pouring into a teacup to relish her lifetime of sunsets—savoured from a dedicated Jaipur viewpoint in 2023, “making me feel like a corrupt customs officer confiscating some expensive bottles of liquor and slyly stashing the confiscated moonshine under a heap of discarded clothes where no one would reach.” This jewel goes well beyond a mere sublime fall or another convenient literary term tapping on the window for admission. It positions beauty where it is least expected, achieving enchantment and engendering suspense for the next gem, and joins art with the mundane and tawdry reality of petty corruption while “Keats’ nightingale (pours) its ecstasy from the heavens.”

The pettiness of hatred, “slivers of grudges, ugly pieces of vindictiveness,” joins with a squirrel’s hoarding to blossom into its wagging tail communicating with mankind in The Benevolence of the Magician.

“…the sleeping flowers had yanked themselves awake,
“groggily peeping from behind clumps of shrubbery…”

Realisation dawns, “No one was singing a dirge,” but that the poet’s own heartbeats rhythm the lament for humankind’s heartlessness.

Consciousness, guided by beauty, comes to the rescue.

A chunk of the blue sky detaches itself, perches on a tree, and a squirrel scampers from the poet’s consciousness to superimpose on the cloud, wagging its tail. Beauty itself entrances the poet, yet offers comfort that the creators and lovers of arts’ “ardour unflagging” will rise to liberate humankind from its shabbiness.

Sunset in a Cup celebrates the disregarded modest and its power to metamorphose the overlooked and raise it to sublimity. By its very nature, this approach is social and inclusive, delighting with its ability to bring to notice the mundane and the observed. It demands due recognition for the agents of transformation.

The Flickering Flame dignifies poverty and celebrates freedom, which has inspired great composition in poetry or prosaic, from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820 ‘Ode to Liberty’ to Langston Hughes’ 1949 ‘Freedom’s Plow,’ and from Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ to Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’

The intangible gold of sunrays forges an uncanny alliance and elevates the humble sparrow to a dimension it would never have aspired to under tutelage. “The sunray has turned the sparrow into a fistful of gold.”

Sunrays ensure life on planet Earth, and gold is the basis of most currencies to pay for tea, with or without a sunset. One is taken for granted, the other is invisible except as bling ostentatiously adorning the human body.

The modest and invisible elevate the insignificant to gold—alchemy from the humble and the unnoticed, usually taken for granted. Finally, “a drop of golden ray” also liberates the inanimate pink lady on the wall into glowing languor.

Near the Bougainvillea Creeper celebrates natality and change.

The 290 species of Nyctaginaceae, the four o’clock family, are native to Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, and Argentina and are only called Bougainvillea for explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a contemporary of James Cook, who documented it for European botanists. Its ubiquitous presence in most countries has globalized and democratized its erstwhile distinction.

Bakaya gets away with celebrating birth and metamorphoses by wielding the unnoticed traits of this omnipresent plant that creeps over walls and into the poet’s consciousness to enunciate the juxtaposition of the beginning of life and its transformation: “leaves shooting the twosome with vivid sunshine.”

Liberating Notes anticipates the last poem, The Blizzard, by celebrating the truly humble that floats unsinging and unsung.

“Slivers of hope, as tiny as dandelion seeds, clung to me.
‘Small is big’, they hissed in my ears.”

Dandelion seeds fly in the wind, irritate the eyes, and creep into the nostrils, yet become messengers for a poet’s resource with which liberating notes may be released to delight and to instruct.

The poet’s sensitivity and perception empower something as commonplace as a falling feather to encapsulate liberty and liberation. Falling feathers are noticed by children. They might not have the maturity to express adult appreciation, but the instinct is the proverbial “from the mouth of babies.”. Childlike innocence appreciates the material modesty that hides the potential of conceptual giants.

The Blizzard aggregates images into the uncertainties of life, brandishing six questions and the decisive inevitability of death. Perception raises an obscuring tornado or a blizzard, the mind enters a state of overspin, and an unmoving lizard swinging on a chandelier during a 6.2 Richter scale earthquake is draped in the translucence of a ghost. 

“Was that a tornado?
A blizzard in which I was inextricably caught?
Why was I awake? Had I got up to slake my thirst?
Or was my forever churning mind about to burst
With some bright new scintillating ideas?”

The interrogatory mark suspends certainty while acknowledging the final release of doubt in death as the great eraser of certitude and submission to the finality of life. The end of “cowering” and finally, the liberation from doubt and uncertainty.

The exquisite vigour of Bakaya’s poetry lures her readers into her elegant saloon to liberate them by rescuing their minds while enjoining patience for the answers that elude them.

“Repentance is… an honest reckoning…accompanied by renewal, a turning of heart and mind—an inner transformation that bears visible fruit.”

The opening and the ending of Bakaya’s poetic collection exceed Aristotelian exigencies. Their integral tentacles interlock to envelop pain and anguish overlying audacious hope that navigates the poems.

The overture of the corpus proclaiming the “raucous raven snatching a piece of bread” transforms with subtlety into the “terrible tentacles and cruel claws” at the end. Perceptive maturity in the closing restrains any temptation to seek optimism through inversion. The complementary images cohabit effortlessly.

As the day implicitly dawns, “Raindrops … moonbeams filling the vacuity” merge into the “morning sun… on strike,” confining the lure of conscious or unconscious naiveté.

“Santa Claus fallen on bad days” finds no reprieve when “sighs are crushed, voices throttled.” Yet, “the New Year insinuates itself on the scene in old clothes attired but sporting a brand new sheen.”

Squarely facing the downside of humanity, Bakaya does not shirk the poet’s moral imperative to bring it into focus. Yet, no symphonic tantara is emitted by Cherubim and Seraphim to herald a dramatic change in form and content.

After a sensitive canvas of the human condition, she inverts Michel Houellebecqian self-pitying nihilism waiting to ambush the reader by evoking continuity of form and metamorphosis of fructified content for a harvest of optimism.

Cover picture from the Internet

Azam Gill

Azam Gill is a novelist, analyst and retired Lecturer from Toulouse University, France. He has authored eight books, including three thrillers — Blood Money, Flight to Pakistan and Blasphemy. He also writes for The Express Tribune, a New York Times affiliate, blogs on his website and is a Contributing Editor for The Big Thrill, a webzine of the International Association of Thriller Writers. He served in the French Foreign Legion, French Navy, and the Punjab Regiment.

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