PANDEMIC PAIN & POETRY

'Lockdown and other Poems' by Pramod Jain offers a painfully poetic trail through the helplessness, despair, and suffering of mankind during the horrid years of the pandemic, while also vividly capturing the pulse of uncertainty that the nature holds, and its myriad manifestations

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

Authors of most books published in the last two years—and I know this from reading the Prologue/Preface/Acknowledgments in books nominated for the Valley of Words Book Awards—have given credit to the Covid Lockdown for giving them the ‘enforced time and the confined space’ to ruminate, reflect and write their narratives. Some have captured the reality of those times: from children’s books like Jamlo Walks by Samina Mishra and Tariq Aziz to contemporary classics like The Blind Matriarch by Namita Gokhale. While the former looks at what lockdown did to her young citizens, the latter chronicles not just the cynicism, despair and tragedies of India’s encounter with the Corona virus but also the resilience and strength of the human spirit. For those of us who have lived through these years, it was a traumatic experience as one felt both ‘helpless’ in the face of adversity, and ‘overwhelmed’ by stories of valour, courage, sacrifice—emotions which have been captured by my batchmate and friend Pramod Jain in his wonderful offering ‘Lockdown and other Poems’, published earlier this year.

As there are forty-seven poems, and each one of them is brilliant and evocative, one is compelled to choose and share with the readers a subjective selection which is representative of the times we went through during the two phases of Covid and the four clearly identifiable stages of lockdown—complete, restricted, partial and optional. During the phase of complete lockdown, the irony of the situation is best expressed in these lines: ‘Like caged animals/Humans are condemned indoors/for their hubris, sins and wayward crimes/against nature/Animals roam freely, playfully/enjoying the new found freedom/reclaimed after centuries of chains/clamped by civilization.’

The theme reverberates in