Re-reading Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928), Indian English poet per excellence, is the first Indian poet to win Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry, for his book Relationships. He was awarded the Padma Shri, fourth highest civilian honour in India in 2009. He is also a recipient of the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award conferred by Poetry magazine, Chicago, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize for 2009 from The Sewanee Review, the SAARC Literary Award, New Delhi, 2009, an honorary doctorate by Ravenshaw University in 2009, and a D. Litt degree by Utkal University, Odisha in 2006.

Re-reading Jayanta Mahapatra is a selection of the seminal poems of poet Padmashree Jayanta Mahapatra, meticulously selected by Indian English poet Professor Nandini Sahu, with a long critical introduction by her. The book highlights the quality of tranquility and quietude about his poetry, and celebrates the nostalgic elements of Mahapatra's poetry. While the book hardly confines him as a ''Romantic', as he is not prepared to accept the capability of romantic imagination-the book problematizes Mahapatra's dismissal of the term 'romantic' vis-à-vis himself. . Nandini argues, his poetry reveals a self that is secluded and withdrawn, but it is romantic to the core. Mahapatra began his poetic career as a poet of love. His earlier poetry tried to capture the multiple facets of love, so as to relate it to the redolent conformation of life. Even if Mahapatra is 'rueful' about his beginning as a love poet, yet it is through his love poetry that he could learn how to establish a rapport with the cultural tradition in his later poetry. Nandini venerates his poetry; as a fellow poet herself, she is proud of belonging to the historiography of Indian English poetry that Mahapatra shaped. His poetry has been the poetry of departure into the self, like a Pantheist, where it is unadorned, moving and still, sans pretense and insincere masks.