Antabujula | Manua Dash

Review by Madhusmita Jena

Poetry is often reviewed as if it were a puzzle to be solved, its metaphors decoded, its meanings neatly arranged. Antabujula by Manua Das asks for something else: not interpretation, but attention.

This is a book that listens to the world before speaking. Its poems move through the intimate and the immense memory, loneliness, love, identity, violence, faith, hunger, displacement, history and the landscape of Odisha. Yet the poet does not treat these as distant themes. They arrive as lived realities: a hand, a road, a village, a railway station, a drought, a scream, a remembered face. The ordinary is made to carry the weight of the extraordinary.

What makes Antabujula distinctive is its movement between tenderness and resistance. A poem can begin with an image of nature and suddenly open into questions of injustice; a personal ache can widen into a meditation on society. The language is sometimes lyrical, sometimes stark, and often unsettling. There are poems that feel like conversations with memory, and others that resemble public testimony. Even technology finds its place, suggesting how life has altered the ways we connect, isolate and hope.

The collection does not offer the comfort poetry is expected to provide. Instead, it leaves traces. Some poems stay because of an image; some because of a question; some because they make silence feel like part of the poem.

Antabujula is ultimately a book to be lived with rather than read. It reminds us that poetry can still look at a wounded world and refuse to look away.

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