Moon Is Black

Giving words to the mundane, this collection in the post-modern world lends a sense of beauty to the day-to-day contradictions. The grand gestures and the value-laden principles of yester years have given way to the subtle joys of peeping into the gaps. Rakesh Chandra, over the years as a bureaucrat, a husband, a father, a citizen, and a cricket lover has expressed his enchantment with his miss-en-scene in thirty nine poems, bringing out the mockeries of being in today's world. His poems are replete with his natural affinity towards an enquiry of our needs and gestures. Be it the willed ridicule in 'On my laugh', revisiting the classical case of the hare and the tortoise with immortal lines like, 'I raised my head and found his face turned comic in self-conceit. The spring of laughter, then, erupted into me, destroying the crust of shame and agony. Again I was laughing as ever!'. Or, his plea to the elusive sleep to consume his daily strains in 'To Sleep', Rakesh Chandra weaves poetry into his prayer with mesmerizing rhymes like, 'My limbs are eager to come in your lap. With your magical stick plus your grace, please bestow me a single nap.' In 'My office days' he lays asunder the struggling sigh of a bureaucrat surveying the demands posed on him, and his consequent need for strength to shoulder the responsibilities. 'There are problems too, lurking into atmosphere, and problems are infinite, ' the bureaucrat notes. A lover cannot resist his contradictory instincts in 'While you are angry'. He loves the anger in her eyes, but also finds perfection in her smile. Rakesh Chandra, beautifully evokes the duality - 'You were so beautiful in the violet of your rage, that was writ large where I tried in vain, to search for the lost vestiges of the gleaming calm'. Full of such beautiful idiosyncrasies, longing sighs, satirical rhymes, joyous expositions, earthy pangs, this collection is a worthy addition to the contemporary poetry coming out of the sub-continent.