Beyond Feelings

Bishnupada Sethi's third volume "Beyond Feelings" carries forward the search with which he began his poetic journey in his first volume "Where Shall I Go!" Here questions of home and destiny keep eluding the poet as he realizes that both of them ever keep changing their places or merging one with the other. Finding that he has "no desire to move away from (home)" he carries it in him wherever he goes. And the idea of home for the poet is not a definite place where he lives but the places and situations where he has been. The pillars of strength of Sethi's poetry are fulfilling filial relationship, childhood innocence and participation in cultural activities. Yet it is the scientist in him that brings about a just equilibrium; "Like the particles in air/and clay in waters/ in my mind, the heavier matters/ are all settling down." Fine residues they are. Once conflicting matters "settle" down to the bottom of one's understanding one does not have to grope for, as Sethi shows, answers to the ever bugging questions like "Where was I?" or "Where am I heading?" Above all, the poet's distancing from the objects of desire has enabled him to achieve a lucidity which becomes the watermark of his poetry. The volume could not have been titled better.