Two new poetry collections — Sonnet Mondal’s ‘Clamour for a Handful of Rice’ and Aranya’s ‘The Map is Not the Territory’ — insist that meaning emerges from lived, embodied realities rather than ideological distance.
Neither poet allows suffering or experience to become abstract. Mondal grounds large-scale injustice in images of the body, appetite, ritual and loss; Aranya anchors political and cultural complexity in the sensuous particulars of sound, taste, colour and place.
In different ways, both collections demonstrate a commitment to poetry as a mode of ethical attention — a means of staying with the textures of the world rather than smoothing them into concepts.
Mondal’s poems are often driven by a stark moral urgency. Hunger, war and political deceit recur not as distant headlines but as conditions that press upon everyday life. The domestic and the geopolitical collapse into one another: the ‘billboard foods’ become works of fiction; ‘the temple of your body/reeks of gunpowder and grief’; the cows tear ‘their last grass of the day’; and hope becomes ‘a bullet-cracked mirror’. These poems demand an uncomfortable proximity to suffering, asking what it means to bear witness when injustice has become routine.
Aranya’s approach invites the reader to register the multilingual pulse of metropolitan India. These poems are deeply attentive to soundscapes and atmospheres: the hubbub of streets, the discipline of classical music, the quiet order of libraries, the exuberance of youth subcultures. This multiplicity is held together by a tonal assurance that allows the poems to move fluidly across registers, often looking for companions in authorship — from Nainsukh to Leonard Cohen.
There are many love poems in Aranya’s book, but one of the most striking is ‘all night the crickets write their love notes in braille’. Here, love is not confined to the human alone; the poetic voice moves seamlessly between the human and the more-than-human. ‘Because the body has rivers, and in each unstopped/torrent, tiny fishes learn the smell of water,’ he writes, collapsing desire, ecology and embodiment into a single lyric gesture. Sensory richness becomes a way of thinking about connection — between bodies, species, and landscapes — rather than a retreat from political or ecological concern.
Clamour for a Handful of Rice by Sonnet Mondal. Copper Coin. Pages 110. Rs 499
Mondal’s urgency, on the other hand, is often sombre. In ‘Today a Missile Struck the Head of Buddha’, he writes: ‘Today a missile is stuck in the head of Buddha./Where will the birds sit now?//Today the rice bowls are filled with bullet shells./How would you teach hunger to value our gods?’ The poem stages a devastating collision between the sacred, the domestic and the violent, exposing the fragility of moral frameworks in the face of militarised reality. Where Aranya’s poems often open outward into multiplicity, Mondal’s narrow their focus, sharpening attention on moments of rupture and moral failure.
Despite these tonal differences, a shared philosophical undercurrent runs through both collections: an awareness that language is inadequate yet necessary. Mondal’s poems repeatedly gesture towards what cannot be fully articulated — the scale of hunger, violence and ethical collapse — while Aranya’s very title foregrounds the gap between representation and reality. The map, these poems remind us, can never fully contain the territory it describes. Yet both poets continue to write, aware of the limits of language.
Neither collection offers easy closure or redemptive comfort. Mondal’s poems remain morally restless, often ending in unresolved tension; Aranya’s resist neat mapping or synthesis, favouring openness and uncertainty. This refusal of consolation is radical and part of their yearning.
Both books trust the reader to sit with complexity rather than resolve it, to remain attentive to the world as it is: insistently alive yet fractured, sensuous and unjust.
— The reviewer is a poet
