Sonnet Mondal’s An Afternoon in My Mind is a young man’s meditation on time, filled with the recognition that it is too late to return to childhood. It is both personal and political, concerned with questions of the spirit and of matter.
The plain-spoken tone of these poems is a cover for their deeper metaphysical inquiries. Narrative saturates every observation: “A man stands holding his bicycle/ in the bus stop shed. When he rides away the story will follow him,” Mondal writes in “On a Snowy Morning.”
The poems investigate loss, yearning, and solitude. But they do not forgo humor, as in the wry, wary “Another Reason to Live.” “Someone advised me to watch / monochromatic films and let whiskey / slip across a placid tongue to come out of this swamp.”
Mondal seems to have eschewed this advice. His tongue is not placid; it speaks with an impassioned clarity full of energetic surprise. “I went inside a forest to sip some solitude / and now I am stuck in a wildfire.”
Excerpts from the book:
Hungry Faith
The fisherman in the Sundarbans
was hauling his boat out of mud
and into an intoxicated river.
Between the prow and his hands
a sweat-soaked turban
hollowed out the sounds of struggle.
His bulging veins more resolute
than the wary holes
of the fishing net—soaking up the sun.
The stooping trees of the forest
tried to lend a hand
but, held by the riverbank,
moaned in the wind.
The water looked warm
but didn’t rise to the boat.
Somewhere in the fragmented sun
hunger was savoring muddy toil.
Tangled
Stories of loneliness stay
warm inside my blanket, get
replaced without a sound.
Arms raised, a leafless tree
prays for its death.
I wish I understood those birds, their songs
struggling to break free from the branches.