(reviewed by Mai White)
The cover of Mind Cityscape by Amanita Sen is both visually stunning and symbolically layered. The title itself carries an attracting tension, with the word CITY notably struck through, hinting at a deliberate reimagining or critique of urban life. This strike, combined with the fusion of MIND and CITYSCAPE suggests a poetic journey that moves beyond the visible structures of a city into the psychological and emotional landscapes they mirror or conceal. A neon-outlined skyline emerges from the silhouette of a human face at the bottom, reinforcing the idea that the city is not just a place, but a state of mind. Through this clever interplay of image and text, the cover sets the stage for a collection that promises reflection shaped by the sharp angles and soft shadows of metropolitan existence.
The collection of poems presented in this volume reveals a deeply reflective and suggestive voice that navigates the landscapes of emotion, memory, and human experience. Divided into thoughtfully titled sections: Four Seasons, Towards You, Mindscape, and Follow the Sun, the table of contents itself acts as a poetic map through which Amanita Sen guides her readers. Poems such as On a Cloudy Day, The “Maya” of Late Autumn, and While Talking to the Sea suggest a sensitivity to nature and the brief moods it mirrors within us. Taking a turn from the natural to the deeply personal, titles like Unborn Daughter, Losing You, and The Rinsed Heart examine into themes of personal loss and emotional vulnerability. Amanita Sen’s poetic range is further reflected in her toned approach to urban life, identity, and relationships, with works like Love Letter to My City and An Evening in My City with a Friend from a Strife-torn Land bridging the personal and the political. This emotional and thematic diversity is consistent with her background as a bilingual poet, critic, and translator, as noted in the back cover description. Her dedication to bridging cultures through language and her engagement with film and mental health awareness add further dimension to a voice that is not only literary but socially significant and empathetically adapted.
FOUR SEASONS
The section Four Seasons describes the delicate interplay between nature’s rhythms and human sentiment. Amanita Sen’s sensitivity to the elemental world is evident in poems like On a Cloudy Day, The Summer Poem, and The Mendicant Rain were external weather mirrors internal moods. The imagery suggests a poet adapted to brief moments, filling the everyday with lyrical introspection. Titles such as To Cry and The Face of Kindness reveal how deeply the poet tells emotion into seasonal shifts, offering readers a meditative passage through time, perception, and vulnerability.
Amanita Sen’s poetry rhythms with sensory emotion, where nature and daily gist serve as mirrors to the self. In ON A CLOUDY DAY, she tangles weather with emotional atmosphere, the clouded sky reflecting inner obscurity and yearning. Her metaphor of the sun as a distant lover suggests absence, both cosmic and intimate, portraying the ache of separation. This atmospheric sensibility flows through BEING ALIVE, where life’s impermanence is framed not as tragedy but realization. Mera Kuch Saman was borrowed from Hindi film culture becomes an emblem of emotional rest, a collection of feelings too vast for classification. Sen suggests that being alive is not merely biological but emotional is defined by moments that swell in the throat, mist the eyes. In A PASSERBY, the poet surrenders to timeless observation, unanchored by geography but rooted in mindfulness. She doesn’t seek permanence in place, but in the stillness of bearing witness. This is a poetics of transience, where the external world, weather, time and streets provides context for interior motion.
On days like this, the heart swells, as if it needs a spillage to go on.
The never-to-be-written letters seek ink from the sky.
They wish to borrow from the black of the clouds, for black knows it all.
How you basked in their glory! How you were drunk on the sunshine!
The inaudible yet happy murmur was the refrain that played in your mind.
It is a timeless place, too,
where evenings round off with temple bells
and seasons bear their fruits loyally.
You are the ageless being sitting atop a hillock,
watching the continuum flow by.
A passerby couldn’t pass you by you sealed the moment with a smile.
Throughout her work, Sen reclaims joy and grief through retrospection and sensory intimacy. THE SUMMER POEM mourns the brevity of joy but finds light in memory, casting summer’s warmth across winter’s cold. Similarly, PUJO PUJO RODDUR transforms autumnal sunlight into a pot for ancestral memory, where grief is quietly cued by the sensory trigger of festival light. This interplay of sense and sorrow deepens in SENSORY, where death is not marked by dates but by lasting impressions: a ripe mango, a certain light, the feel of sky. Loss is not a singular event but a texture created into everyday perception. Even ordinary objects like FINGER RINGS bear emotional effect, turning love and absence into physical remains. Her poem WEEDS further amplifies this principles of the overlooked: weeds as emblems of quiet survival, humble metaphors for marginal beauty. Here, Sen’s poetic lens reveals the sacred in the simple, finding kinship in life’s continuing but unnoticed elements.
Until the day comes when you learn to reap summer in the dark of winter.
That is, after the spells of grief and the puddles of loss have dried up.
On their slender forms, with the face-like nails for company,
they sink in deeper with time- as if in a tight, amorous embrace.
Festivals have this thing about them- they summon all those whose presence,
as sure as daylight, as taken for granted too,
has turned into a distracting absence you were never primed to sail through.
Sen’s work also rhythms with an ethic of tenderness and resistance, where kindness arises as both balm and rebellion. In TO CRY, emotional drought is broken not by grand gestures but by a whisper of concern, a rare softness in a hardened world. This sensitivity is in THE FACE OF KINDNESS, where death is compared with tiny acts of grace, a banana, a pendant, broken beads, tokens that rescue meaning from finality. THE MENDICANT RAIN furthers this quiet restoration, that rain becomes therapeutic, not overwhelming, cleansing but careful, just enough. Even cemeteries become spaces of refuge in INSIDE THE CEMETERY. Grief is shared with dead trees and fallen leaves, more accepting than the living. Her LOVE LETTER TO MY CITY blends civic longing with protest, as Kolkata (or a stand-in for it) becomes a sentient being, flawed, beloved, and witness to personal and political pain. Across her composition, Sen twists Bengali culture such as maya, Pujo, Langra Aam into a universal fabric of emotion. Her brilliance lies in soft intensity: she writes not to dazzle, but to remain like perfume in an old scarf, familiar but elusive, always wafting by the moment you don’t pay attention.
The sunlight was as frank, impartial,
and impassioned as could be when the doctor said
Father would soon pass away.
//
The mendicant rain poured as if it knew the precise,
metered dose to tame the heat, to soothe its oppressive blaze.
//
Like the way nature knows it all,
it holds us until we set out again
for the rest of our walk among the living.
//
You made me cry, dear city, for these have been unsettling times.
We rose up to greet the molten rage, a pristine grief at mindless brutality.
//
The old elevator door
needs the right thrust
of my hands to close.
Not with a loud clang,
for then it rebounds,
swinging open again.
//
You can simply ignore –
how does it matter to you
if her vision is blurry?
Or you can ask for her glasses,
carefully clean the lenses,
and hand them back to her.
It depends on who she is to you
and how you see
the whole matter of her seeing.
TOWARDS YOU and FOLLOW THE SUN
In these parts, the poet’s lens turns inward to explore themes of familial ties, grief, identity, and unspoken longing. This section feels intimate and emotionally charged, with titles like Unborn Daughter, Losing You, and Father’s Laughter pointing to personal loss and memory. Amanita Sen navigates these delicate terrains with grace and restraint, allowing the unsaid to echo between lines. The directness of emotion in these poems speaks to her ability as a bilingual translator to distil complex feelings into lyrical clarity, resonant across cultural and linguistic divides.
In this collection of poems, poet Amanita Sen creates a moving and thoughtful collection that explores the relationship between our inner emotions and the world around us, especially life in the city. The book is divided into sections and each offering a different view of personal experience, memory, and emotional change. The poem titles themselves like Father’s Laughter, Unborn Daughter, Boat Capsize, Wading Through Darkness, and The Silence Following the Story’s End immediately stir feelings and invite readers to think more deeply. These titles suggest pain, love, loss, and the quiet struggles that shape us.
Amanita Sen uses simple, clear, and carefully chosen language. Her poems are not overly decorative or filled with complex words; instead, they go straight to the heart of the emotion she wants to express. Her writing style is gentle yet strong, with a quiet sadness that lingers in the background, making each line feel meaningful and alive. She often says a lot with just a few words, allowing readers to feel what is not directly spoken.
Sen’s experience as a translator and literary critic also enriches her work. Moving smoothly between Bengali and English, she brings a deep understanding of language, rhythm, and culture. This gives her poems a special musical quality and emotional depth. Her background in film is also noticeable. Many of her poems feel like short, vivid scenes from a movie, filled with carefully chosen images that tell quiet but powerful stories.
In nearly every piece included in this thoughtful and emotionally rich collection, Sen writes about feelings of being lost, moments of quiet strength, and the emotional ups and downs of daily life. But she does this in a soft and thoughtful way, never forcing meaning but allowing it to come naturally. Mind(City)Scape is, in many ways, a quiet path through the heart and the city, an exploration of how we live, remember, and keep going. It shows Amanita Sen’s great skill as a poet and her rare gift for expressing emotions that many people feel but struggle to put into words.
At the end of Mind(City)Scape, readers are left with a quiet but strong feeling. Amanita Sen’s poems do not try to be loud or flashy. Instead, they gently invite us to think about deep feelings like sadness, happiness, love, and loss. Her voice is calm, kind, and clear. It does not try to push too hard, but it still touches the heart in a strong way. The poems feel real—sometimes broken, sometimes full of light—but always true. Sen writes about many parts of life: changes in our feelings, relationships with others, and the quiet struggles of living in a busy city. Her poems show that staying strong does not always mean being loud. Sometimes, it means being quiet, remembering, and understanding what hurts and what helps. Mind(City)Scape is not just a book of poems. It is a gentle guide through the feelings we all go through, shared with care, honesty, and beauty.
About the reviewer:
Mai White (M.Ed., teacher) is a poet, writer, and literary critic based in Western Australia. She is the author of many poetry collections and the editor of four major anthologies featuring poems of more than 250 poets each. As an educator and cultural advocate, Mai brings a cross-cultural lens and lyrical sensitivity to her reflections on contemporary literature. Mai was recently granted an Award of Commendation for Excellence in Literary and Cultural Contribution by the Consulate General in Perth, in recognition of her efforts to promote culture through poetry and language in Australia.
