Bangladesh’s English poetry scene is thriving on the rise of young poets who have brought a new wave of verse writing. After Razia Khan Amin and Kaiser Haq, we have had to wait quite a few decades for fresh blood in poetry. With Across Oceans and Not Elegy, But Eroscametwo breakthroughs with the arrival of two distinct poetic voices. Then came the Versemongers, a group of six poets who have been consistently enriching the (English)literary pages and journals in Dhaka. Now with Sabrina Fatma Ahmad’s Sehri Tales, we seem to have made another bold stride in the growth of this new wave.
When a cluster of these poems were first published in the pages of this magazine, the poet herself added a note, explaining the occasion and time during which these poems were written:
“When I first started the #sehritales project, it was something of a self-challenge, to see if I could wake up at sehri time every night during Ramadan and compose something on the fly. At first, the biggest challenge was the structure of the poems. I'm much more comfortable with prose microfiction, and don't have a drop of poetry in my soul, so that was fun.
“And then, once I got into the groove, the next challenge was finding topics. I had given myself a couple of rules: no post longer than 250 words (I hate reading status ‘essays’ and didn't want to subject my friends to the same); no politics, preaching, or activism. This was supposed to be a purely literary exercise.” She also added at the end: “The last week of Ramadan, with the terrorist attack at home and the ones immediately preceding and following it abroad, the challenge was to find the motivation to continue writing.”
The idea sounded excellent and the outcome was not only an exuberant outburst of verses, distributed over a variety of stylistic experiments, but also a commendable exercise in structural purity. Purity of structure is not usually what I look for in poetry because when rules of a particular form are not applied effectively, or aptly, the poem often fails to touch readers. However, I am a huge stickler for exercises in controlled outburst of emotions.Enforcing structural purity while also letting feelings and emotions flow spontaneously is the biggest feat Sabrina has achieved in her debut poetry collection.
From limerick to stonehenge to haiku to microfiction, consider how in the following instances she expresses her dark fears about many of the social and political excesses of our time and at the same time, talks about her high hopes for a better future, never compromising the meters and rhythms required of those poetic genres:
Dark, dreary dreams drive sleep away
Heavy is the heart I've carried all day
Afraid to pause, reflect and recall
Knowing I can't make sense of it all
All I can do is remember, hope and pray
(Limerick)
The next two are instances of “Stonehenge” and the poet herself provides a note to describe the structure of this form: “a Stonehenge is a three-line prose poem developed at Champlain College, Virginia, in the early 2000s. It consists of a single line of action “propped up” by the two preceding lines of description.”
Threads of gossip, rumours and misinformation
Woven through the fabric of fevered imagination
The fearmongerer raises his black flag in triumph
***
A white, blank space
A blinking cursor
Sleep drags my eyelids down, and all fades to black
The last instance I’m going to cite is a haiku:
My beloved ones
I will hold you close tonight
Who knows what's coming?
(Poet’s note: There are many types of haikus. I prefer the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern)
The poet’s notes demonstrate how aware she is of structure, a trait usually brushed aside by poets of our time. After Kaiser Haq, the only other poet who has showed mastery over structured metrical exercise is NausheenEusuf. Now we also have Sabrina who, like her Bangladeshi predecessors, is perfectly capable of capturing a variety of moods most effortlessly.
Ranjan Banerjee is an art critic.