Reaction of American poet Afaa M. Weaver

I am reading "Fish without a Bicycle " a delightful collection of English translations of poetry by Prabal Kumar Basu. I see myself assembling as I read. The book is a mirror that opens with a poem making metaphoric use of anatomy and blindness. ​The body as fact and representation to foreshadow awakening is the compass that leads me into my initial discovery of India. In “The Lost Country,” the poet presents the persona of a blind man looking for someone in a heap of bodies, and the first sense of the familiar comes when he touches organs he knows. For the poet it is not discovery but reclamation, and that reclamation begs me to look at my own interior world. Reclamation for the poet becomes recognition for this reader. ​These are poems with a philosophical tenor, some of which is given as aphorisms or parables, and throughout it all there is the concern for what the poet sees as the need for each of us to deepen our humanity thought realizing the importance of connecting with one another, of trusting, of realizing we can choose to build rather than destroy. This vulnerability appears again and again in the writing, and each time I see it, I sense the generosity I see in India, or the possibility of generosity. There is a richness in India that Prabal brings in his writing out of his love of his country. This is not the grandiosity of a poet who might imagine the world as his or her audience, but rather tears off pieces of himself with the faith that he is also tearing at the body of his homeland as offering. ​Divided into two sections, A Fish Without a Bicycle opens and stirs the peeping eyes of the visible and invisible forces in our lives.The lyricism is palpable. It takes on form and becomes something I can taste as I read. ​Prabal looks at historical figures, and he wonders where they are in the cycles of becoming and undoing, being and nonbeing. In “Che” he talks about the historical Che Guevara, as someone now living an ordinary life, convinced that revolution is a “discarded utopia.” Che has a girlfriend and is studying the ways of his new culture. In “A day in the Mundane Life,” the poet recounts meeting towering figures, including God, Lenin, and Shakespeare. God is a beggar. Lenin is a milkman who delivers to the doors of his customers. Shakespeare is presumably a government official because he asks the poet for his identity card. That which is big is also quite small, and that which is quite small is also rather big, or even infinite. ​ I feel I can begin to know India through the work of Bengali poet Prabal Kumar Basu. I can believe I once lived there, eons ago, that perhaps I was one of many traveling monks who went to China to teach a spiritual path. Maybe I was that, or I was someone who cleaned the floors of a small shop owned by someone who had compassion for me. May be that is all just an imaginative gesture flowing out of me as I sit at this machine and compose, doing what the poet says in poem “38”: “I lower the rope and realize/ that the well is deep…” On this first trip into you, I was given many doors, including this marvelous collection of poetry, telling no one that I had just lost my forty-nine year old son a few months before, that I had to verify that his organs were indeed his so they could be replaced into his body, and in that way I came to know him more deeply than I could have imagined. If poetry is a dream, the first dream in this book by Basu helps me realize anew the infinity of life and love, the beauty of the divine. ​