Review: Debarshi Mitra
On Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra
by Tyler Truman Julian
Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra came out in 2020, at the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, making it hard to separate the collection from the slow and grief-filled days of the deep pandemic. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three years since the world paused in response to COVID-19. While the publishing world didn’t pause—books continued to come out—the attention around these books, the marketing, the promotion, even the reading of these new books definitely slowed. For this reason, it makes sense to revisit these works and give them their due—even three years on. As a result, Osmosis deserves attention as a document of that period, but also a profoundly relatable look at grief and human relationship.
Osmosis is a slim, tightly written collection, choosing to focus on description and detail (often with haiku-like brevity) to explore its themes of grief and relationship. To some this may appear too simple, but it’s Mitra’s subtle attention to detail that adds depth to his themes. For example, “On Arrival” presents a speaker returning home, and in this home, “The air is stiff” and “the floors have / shoe stains on them.” The word choice is intentional; the use of stiff rather than still or musty implies not only that the house is empty (and has been for a while), but that there is something uncomfortable about the homecoming. Further, shoe stains imply a history, ghosts even. While the caesura and linework feels less important to the poem’s structure and meaning (and less important through the collection as a whole), the brevity of the lines adds intentionality to the images and message of the poem:
My books and other things
are exactly where
I last saw them
where they always were,
only my mind
is elsewhere. (“On Arrival”)
While the speaker is physically in this old familiar space, their thoughts are elsewhere, and they feel separate from the connections made in the space. The poem makes this clear, and this idea colors the rest of the collection. This is particularly interesting looking back at this collection knowing it came out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing the isolation and loss of the pandemic, this collection reads differently, has a prescience to it that is remarkable.
The intentionality of image and message in this collection give the reader something concrete and universal to cling to in poems that could feel immensely personal. How many of us felt “all alone” during the early days of the pandemic? How many of us have been “All alone” “led astray / by a thought / barefoot / walking / on a winter night” in our daily life? These five lines highlight the relatability of the speaker’s lack of relationship to others and even to the place they have found themselves in, even if the reader is left with room to insert their own emotions.
The juxtaposition of personal detail and the universality of the moment being described continues throughout the collection. In “Family Sundays,” the speaker places the reader in the center of a family event:
Anecdotes of
grandparents
and dead aunts.
On the centre table
a decapitated wax turtle.
I look both ways
to cross a one way street.
This personal moment, tied inextricably to the loss and lack of connection the speaker feels, is universal in its simplicity, even if the chosen details are specific. The reader is able to connect with the speaker and imagine their own family events (“anecdotes of grandparents / and dead aunts”). And the speaker’s inability to feel secure in their relationships, looking “both ways to cross a one way street,” is something most readers can relate to, especially post-COVID. In “Loss,” Mitra’s speaker is more forthright, embracing a more narrative form:
It was always this way,
was always a metaphor
built on fragments and
a physical space stretched
by light streaming in
from one side of this endless
corridor.
It is more than the corridor that stretches endlessly; it’s also the speaker’s grief and the lost connection they once felt with a beloved relation. The speaker continues from that corridor,
It is here that
I preserve the image
of you bending
to pluck tulsi leaves
from a yellowing tulsi plant,
and suddenly remember that
for all these years now
after your passing,
I have forgotten even
to part curtains. (“Loss”)
This moment is personal, but relatable, and the shift to narrative poetry is intentional. The reader has already added their own personal details to the spare poems in this collection, building a connection with the speaker and the places they describe. Now, the speaker can specify the grief they feel and the reader will be invested. The reader may have to read between the lines, fill in the ample white space around the images painted by the speaker, but in doing so, they will find “the pale, / imperceptible shadow / of death itself” (“Between the Lines”). Even if the speaker feels adrift through the collection, the poems effortlessly link the reader and the speaker, cultivating some sense of solace amid the loss riddled throughout the collection. It is the writing itself that creates this relationship because the only thing “between two eternities / of darkness” (death and grief) is “the vapour trail / of language” (“Osmosis”).
COVID-19 has created a universal experience of loss, and looking back on the art produced through the pandemic, we can find community and language for our grief and missed connections. Poetry of loss (regardless of if it is written in response to COVID) is powerful because it gives language to emotions we often can’t readily articulate. In Osmosis, Debarshi Mitra not only gives language to loss, he leaves room for the reader to join their loss to the loss explored in the collection’s poems. Personal tragedy becomes universal in Mitra’s poetry, and the timing of this book’s release makes this exploration of grief and lost relationships even more meaningful.