A Book Review of Ampat Koshy’s ‘A “Sonneto” For The Poetic World’ and 'You heard the scream, didn’t you' by Santosh Bakaya
-written by Dominic Francis
I really enjoyed this trip through history examining the sonnet form. I was reminded that the sonnet (‘sonneto’ in Italian, which means ‘little sound’ in English) was originally a small song sung to the accompaniment of an instrument. I think it was in that vein that I crafted my own Shakespearean sonnet (volta, iambic & all) some five or six years again, and then set it to music https://tonnan.bandcamp.com/track/i-never-knew-her-2
Koshy’s explanation of the form’s sequential evolution is concise & clear – there’s so much to take in – as the author offers his own critical musings on a great variety of poems (most by reasonably well-known poets but a few obscure enough for this writer/reader-in-training not to have heard of). A few of the poems I’d read and enjoyed during school and my brief stay at University; it was fantastic to see them again after so many years… and I look forward to reading more of the poets referred to (whose poems are usually quoted in full here), particularly Spenser.
Whenever I was asked my favourite poem as a teenager, I would quickly reply “Bright Star by Keats!” I don’t think I even realized that Keats’ “Bright Star” was a sonnet. Although Koshy gives due praise to the poem, he uses the word ‘jejune’ (CORRECTION: he was quoting the critic called Matthew Arnold) to describe it; myself, I never felt that way about it- I think I accepted it as the vivid declaration of perpetual impossible love materialized through mountainous naturalistic images that it is! Had Keats not been the hopeless romantic that he was, I may not have pursued my expression through the medium of the written word. Reading Ampat Koshy’s commentary on the (probably infinite) variety of ways writers can use this form has inspired me to try my hand at attempting more sonnets, myself. I find writing good sonnets surprisingly difficult (I’ve done three or four ‘Shakespearean’ sonnets and one ‘Roseate’ [the form that Koshy himself invented])… but very satisfying to read once completed.
The second part of the book is a series of 50 Roseate sonnets. Ampat Koshy gets it right in the introduction — Bakaya is a master of urban atmosphere in this one, akin to Dickens. It’s quite easy and very gripping reading, but by my measure not quite as good as her epic masterpiece ‘OH HARK’. With that said, I haven’t ever seen any prose-poetry quite as determined as this — the story is told in quite a linear fashion, from one event to another, unfolding like a little movie. I almost longed for one more philosophical sonnet to conclude this story.
To quote Leonard Cohen,” It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star. I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”
Who is Dominic Francis? A great British writer of spaced-out novels like God's Grotesque Puppets, poetry, and everything else, Dominic Francis is also a musician and a fine lyricist.
The book can be found here: https://www.amazon.in/Sonetto-Poetic-World-Heard-Scream/dp/B0BGDMHRJ6/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Koshy+AV&qid=1674224318&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr
Dominic Francis writes under the pen name Walking Doctor Tonnan.
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