The New Nation - Internet Edition

Madonna of the Rain (a poetry collection) by Rabiul Hasan. Rockford, Illinois: Rockford Writers Guild Press, 200B, pp. 6B. Price US $ J 5.95. Reviewed by Munir Muztaba Ali.

Does anyone like a fit of the blues? The answer is probably no, but we must admit that we all have a little bit of them in us and do not mind feeling melancholy once in a while, especially if the source of that melancholy is a good piece of literature with a tinge of dejection in it. Poet and storyteller Rabiul Hasan's (whose work is widely published in Bangladesh and the United States) first book of poetry in the English language, Madonna of the Rain, is imbued with notes of melancholia. Love is an enduring theme in his poems, but his love is an elusive love, love that is beyond his reach, love that will never be in reality, and that seems to make his life drift away to despair and desolateness. Hence, though Hasan does not seem to be altogether indifferent toward life, he does seem to be relishing the thought of after-life. These two important aspects, elusive love and the thought of after-life, are all pervasive in Hasan's poems, and they got superbly portrayed by a skilled poet who knows how to use the right word at the right place to evoke an emotion and stir a tragic feeling in the reader without necessarily showing any hamartia on the part of his persona.

In Hasan's title poem, "Madonna of the Rain", he seems to be excited about his lady love (his ma donnamy lady), " t and through the rain! I will walk straight to the other end of the hamlet! To visit MariaJme, who like an undinel Holds her water-filled breasts toward the invisible sun", but he knows her to be "like the dreams I have not dreamt" of realizing his love for her, although Marianne, having lacked a soul, seems to be waiting like an undine for a mortal to come and mate with her and give her a soul. In "After a Busy Week", Hasan writes, "She would call me, she would not call me. I She would come, she would not come. I Am I waiting for someone? Carmen, Carmen t ./ Sometimes I love this aloofness-this strange solitude." This vacillation between hope and despair is the upshot of the persona's many experiences of his love being elusive. In "I Am Drifting Away, Marianne", he writes, "I am rotten like moth-eaten apple, I And wasted, pining into the grave, you can seel I need you, call you, and cry for you: I Marianne, do you hear me?" The question seems be a rhetorical one, and we know the answer that Marialme won't show up. We can feel the pinch of despair here, and the despair gives way to the thought of after-life in "Leaving" where he writes, "The earth is leaving me. So are you. And I am/ Leaving all: flowers, woods, love, my roots-myself. I am leaving all. Hear me, Miriam. Hear me well.1 can die, you kindly bury me beneath the earth, I or hurl me quietly into that eternal black river in Hades."

Pastoral elements and natural sceneries abound in Hasan's poems since most of his poems are set in the U.S. country side, but we see mostly the gloomy side of nature. "Rain yesterday. Rain today. More rain tomorrow. I Roads dark, half-sunk. No grass. Grasses deep under streams", "Madonna of the Rain" opens with these lines, which divulge nature's pensive mood. "Madonna" sets the melancholic mood of many other poems; the melancholia only gets deeper. Even if we see the bright luslmess of nature here and there once in a while, it is immediately juxtaposed with its gloomy opposite. In his "On a Moonlit December Night Near Charleston, Mississippi", he seems to enjoy the view of night "Majestic fields for miles to see the earth straddled with stars, I And the moonlight break(s) out in the orchards by the Tallahatchie" river but his night is also "dipped into ashes of snow" when he swims through the "long, empty, winding road ending up nowhere" and hears the "distant thuds of landslides, the fringy, muffled snow". In "After the Rain", we see "Roads glaze-wind through the swollen fields", but everything around is "gray, vapor, I t the faces growl Thin as daylight fades toward the dimming west". In "December Snow", the snow is compared to "the velvet shroud thick on the ground" where the grasses are "stiff under the serge of white." Hasan's treatment of nature reminds us of two English romantic poets-Byron and Shelly. He successfully fuses the wild and stormy aspects of nature as seen in Byron with the shifting and changeful aspects as manifested in Shelley.

Hasan's feeling of melancholia reaches its pim1acle in poems such as "Depression" and "The Call" in which his detachment to earth transcends his attachment to it, and he seems to long for his final journey into eternity. In "Depression" he writes, "One or two stars know what I feel when I cross my fingers. I Some day I will jump into the river and drown". And the final call for that journey into eternity seems to have corne from his poem "The Call" in which he asks, "Who calls me from the lonely, dark place?" He knows the answer, so do we.

Does he respond to that call valiantly? Does he subscribe to the wisdom of Lord Buddha who says, "From attachment comes grief; from attachment comes fear. / Whoever is free from attaclm1ent knows neither grief nor fear?" Just find out. Hasan's Madolma of the Rain is an excellent read for the poetry lovers who like to feel, as the poet feels, a little bit of lugubrious at times. To purchase a copy, contact rabiulhasan@hotmail.com. Rabiul will be in Dhaka during the months of June, July, and August when a signed copy could be acquired.

(The reviewer is an associate professor of English at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.)