Jayanta Mahapatra's Bare Face

Even if one flips and fleets the pages of Bare Face By Jayanta Mahapatra, One will find the same bare face of the poet, The same unchanged Mahapatra. His imagery whatever be that finally takes to His utter lapsing into the realms of Nothingness, existentialism and nihilism And the poet appears to be bewildered. Instead of giving aesthetic pleasure, the poet tasks The brain, With his pictures of the dowry deaths, gender prejudice, Domestic violence and bruises and atrocities on women. A bare realist and a staunch feminist, he is saddened at To hear about the monstrous dowry deaths, The poor girl children reared so poorly And with disparity. The poet sees everything in disbelief, There is nothing in his poetry to believe, Everything is but to contradict and contrast, What you say right is wrong for me. It is his imagery, word-play, the crossword puzzle Which turn him into a modn, modernist or post-modn Otherwise had been not As wrote he not keeping in view modernism. Silence followed by Only Twilight, Collaboration, Traveller, One Clear Night And thereafter to be selective, a few more like The Return, Abandoned Temple, Sometimes can be talked about. The Woman Who Wanted to be Loved appears it Beautiful from the title point of view But in reality it is an absurd poem Full of so much absurd things. Privately imagistic and personally referential, It takes to there Where there is coquetry in love, Man and woman relationship described lustful. Irrational and nonsensical things are there in his poetry, Suppose this happens, just suppose you, Had it been, what would it have? The origin of the universe, the composition of light And its coming at dawnbreak And its going at twilight, The shadow space, he seeks to know in his poetry.