REVIEW: Dancing Earth

REVIEW
Dancing Earth: An anthology Of Poetry From Northeast India
Edited By Robin Singh Ngangom , Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih
Penguin Books-India
Rs. 350
Pp 344
ISBN: 9780143102205
Paperback

Blurb


The poets of North-East India, though belonging to diverse spaces, cultures, languages and religions, share a common bond. It is a sensibility defined by a deep connection with the land; the overarching presence of nature in their lives; the predominance of myths and tribal folklore; and the search for an identity. All this informs their poetry and gives it a unique flavour. Much of the distinctiveness of their work is also the consequence of contemporary events, often marked by violence. Like its title poem ‘The Dancing Earth’, the anthology too, is a celebration of this life, in all its unpredictable variety, richness and contradictions.  So while Thangjam Ibopishak writes ‘I Want to be Killed By an Indian Bullet’ and Chandrakanta Murasingh speaks of a minister with ‘neither inside nor outside’, there are  also Temsula Ao’s poems about her stone-people ancestors; Mamang Dai’s portraits of swift rivers and primeval forests; and the Shillong poets with their mist-shrouded pine slopes, red cherries and gridlocked streets.

Dancing Earth brings together the best known poets of the region, cutting across languages and time periods. Redolent of native imagery and forceful yet lyrical cadences, this anthology weaves together a remarkable variety of themes, capturing the myriad nuances of the North-East.

Review
Revisiting the northeast with sonnets Little About
The northeast has long been on the fringe of mainstream literary consciousness, edged out by its complex socio-politics, crisis of identity and the prolonged rule of the gun. The literature from the region is a mirror of the angst.  "The Dancing Earth: An anthology Of Poetry From Northeast India", edited by Robin S. Ngangom and Kynpham S. Nongkynrih, is a saga of life as experienced by the seven sisters in the northeast and by Nepal, and told in blank verses and sonnets. The collection brings together some of the best-known poets from the region irrespective of the state to which they belong in English translations.

 The poems manage to bring out the style and the essence of the emotions of the original sonnets.They draw from narrative folklores, songs, social rites, ethnic religions, individual memories, suffering, volatile politics, terror and the loneliness of a breed of young poets.

The poetry addresses two important issues: the question of regional identity in a land that has been described as a contiguous swathe with ethnic diversity, who share a common history, and how violence has seeped into the poetry to breed a gut-wrenching contemporary melange of content and poetic metres.