UNWINDING THE SEMIOTICS IN SUSHEEL KUMAR SHARMA'S “UNWINDING SELF”

Abstract

If direct observation can result in a literary genre of poetic art, analysis of selected poems in “Unwinding Self” becomes inevitable for the evaluation of diverse levels of poetic style, such as Japanese three-line haiku in mini-cantos of the Mahabharta, suggestive iconic-flashes on variable images and events in “Snapshots”, gender performitivity in “Bubli Poems” to gratify femininity with undertones of irony and many more which the poet experiments to prove his poetic mettle. The study attempts to find a formidable ground into the latencies of ‘empirical imagery’, which refer to the poet’s empirical mind that pervades into more than one iconic imagery or event at a time. The Poet’s multiple reflections which remain explicit or manifest in a chain of life-like sequences of variable structures with variable styles are concatenated dexterously in such a way that each poem invites the readers to dive into the poet’s wordplay, drawn on religions, contemporary events, relationships and allusions which the traditions tell in words and numbers. One becomes fanciful to decode the suggestive significance of “The New Year Dawn” with the appearance of ‘three stars’ representing “Orion’s Belt” for the new hunter in the imagery of Magi. The poet’s suggestive line – “Five times a day, my father’s/ Hands go up in the sky” - makes him agnostic and empirical about his Muslim father’s hands that can create colourful designs and build houses instead of knowing the unknowable Supreme. His poems can be approached with the term ‘suggestive objective correlative’ as the poet’s self-soul manifests in different identities, and each poem moves around the central metaphor, which sometimes becomes subtle due to the latent association with the places of visits, dates and years of events and the wordplay in numbers drawn from myths and legends, news, including literature; even the glossary in the collection sheds light on suggestive latencies.