Copper Coin Publishing has come out with Sonnet Mondal’s seventh book of poems, An Afternoon in My Mind. Seventy-five poems with a strong feeling of location, particularly ‘home,’ are included in the collection. A warm glow of reminiscence surrounds you at all times. Readers are immersed into a fascinating, sombre, and evocative muck of feelings and reflections that appear transient but linger like a stimulating and sweet aftertaste long after each poem has finished.
Each poem in the book like a story speak of the poet’s unsettled trip into his inner self and of a period that seems to have slipped between the ignored pages of ordinary and vacuous routines of contemporary existence, which he pulls out effortlessly and breathes life into with a timeless beautiful romance.
‘An Afternoon in My Mind’, transports readers back to their childhood memories, mental battles to combat futuristic concepts, healing crevices of darkness, and fighting till the finish with a continual focus on seeing life as a joyful experience. Memories that are redundant, unwanted, or annoying are erased in his poems. They condense into an after-storm breeze, enveloping us in times of tumult and allowing us to walk alone in times of reflection.
In Ranjit Hoskote’s words, “Every road in Sonnet Mondal’s new collection, An Afternoon in My Mind, moves forward to the past. I use this turn of phrase advisedly, for the past is never concluded in Mondal’s poignant and haunting poems, never fully left behind. It suffuses the present as the remembered scent of first rains and muddy streams. It infiltrates the future in the voice of a vanished grandfather and the resonance of a ferry horn.”
