Of love, longing, and more

Delhi-based PR practitioner Sumana Bhattacharya always liked to scribble down her feelings and things happening around her, but never thought of becoming a writer, let alone a poet. Then one day, she wrote some lines, post a lover spat. Friends who read it, loved what she wrote and motivated her to keep writing. And recently, she unveiled her debut poetry book titled Love & Longings. Published by Notion Press, the book comprises 26 poems capturing different moods and feelings.

“The book is loosely based on my experiences. My early days of growing up in a small town Agartala reflect in my poem, My City Lost, Sparrows and Squirrels. The ones on love stem from my experiences of requited and unrequited, but these are coloured by imagination. When I look back and find things that were once so dear to me missing or changing beyond comprehension, I try to capture them in a poem,” she says.

Bhattacharya, who also runs a blog The Retro Feeling on the nostalgia of the 80s, wrote these poems during the past 18 months. “I have always admired poetry. I have spent hours reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and works of Robert Burns, Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats and Browning. Romantic poems were my favourite,” adds the 46-year-old. But rhyming is not her thing. “I want my poems to flow freely. I write them as they come to me, and rhyme doesn’t always come naturally.”

Photographs of people and places known to her accompany some of her poems. “The picture of the couple with the poem True Love is of my friends Sanjay and Sanchita, who have been together for 20 years. The woman in the picture with the poem When the Wait is Over is me. I was waiting for someone.... And Somethings Missing has a collage of me on the lap of my paternal grandmother, with my maternal grandparents, as the poem captures my longing for the people who left me,” she says.

Details

 Pages: 56  Publisher: Notion Press 
 Price: Rs 99  AT: amazon.in