Thirty Summer Poems And Conversation About A Murder: A Book Review

The newest book by Dr Sabarna Roy is his tenth literary work and a kind of riveting snack that you consume at a subterranean hi-tea. The snack unfolds into a dark gorge of painful thoughts that a post-modern urban man has to go through in his daily life. 

The thirty poems have been written between June 1, 2022, and July 6, 2022, almost at a pace of each poem a day; the poet exhausting his inner self: opening his darkest thoughts for the readers to fall into a nightly vortex of quicksand. 

Despite the unrelenting swarthiness of the poems the beauty lies in the magical stories and montage of images trapped inside each poem. 

It has been written about him, “A technocrat by profession, Roy’s keen observation and detailed sketches of the human mind shine through his literature, proving him to be a literary scientist of sorts who follows no conventions when it comes to soulful writing.”

In the poem ‘Rest’ he writes:
You held my head and guided me to rest my head on your lap
The scent of your body reminded me of the rainforests of Mexico
You caressed my hair and warbled: 
Sleep the sleep of your life; get up into a new world
And then leisurely tell me the story of your life

The lucidity and authenticity of the poems hit you. The prose part of the book, Conversations about a Murder, is a slick and brief conglomeration of three conversation set-pieces where a murder is being probed into by a lady sleuth, Renuka. You want the prose to continue and continue and yet Dr Roy has an impactful style of being brief, terse, and irreverentially incomplete. He attains his objective of incepting an idea into your mind with a million possibilities. Dr Roy from the beginning has been keenly aware of the dwindling attention span of Indian readers in general for multifarious reasons. Without being intrusive on his readers’ time he has been continually making offerings of consequence without being heavy. The book cover leaves an impression of equal intensity. A must read!