Jaydeep Sarangi (left) and Emilie Collyer at the RMIT Non/fiction Lab and RMIT Asia Hub launch of Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock.
Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock by Jaydeep Sarangi, Black Eagle Books 2026, was launched on Monday 4 May via a partnership between RMIT non/fiction Lab and RMIT Asia Hub by Emilie Collyer with guest performance by poet Lesh Karan.
I was fortunate to meet Jaydeep Sarangi while I was undertaking my PhD. One of the tangible benefits of Covid was how it opened up international meetings and collaborations, opportunities to meet scholars and writers from all over the world from the confines of our own studies and homes in a way that I don’t think happened so much before the pandemic. I contributed some poetry to projects Jaydeep was curating and then I was honoured to be invited to guest edit Teesta Review where he is Editor-in-Chief. I have read and heard bits of Jaydeep’s poetry and writing over the last few years. It is such an honour he has made the trip to Australia in person to share his poetry with us and to launch his new book Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock.
The words that come to mind when reading this collection and afterwards are rhythm, music and movement. The book, as Jaydeep himself states in the introduction is thematically based around ‘Kolkata; the city, its heritage, history, people and landscape’.
We travel through this city via Jaydeep’s poetry via many different perspectives. The poems evoke the sounds, smells, stories and beat of a city. We learn about this city, its people, its personality, via geography, history, place and maps both external and internal.
The collection is not, as is often the case, divided into sections. Each poem flows into the next. I might use the metaphor here of being on the streets, following a path, letting your feet take you. Or indeed, of a river, the Ganges features in many poems.
I share these lines from the poem ‘Unsaid Gifts Within’:
In early dawn streets are free and thoughtful.
Knockers on doors or windows to rouse all from sleep
where seasons arrive and go to touch and join with
barren trees taking away all leaves gently, moist in September rain
While the range of poems is broad and deep, the scale of each poem is concise. These are small pockets of compressed language, where the sensory meets a reflective mind. Very few poems go over one page. Each invites the reader to read the words at surface level, then to read again and dive deeper, read once more and let the words resonate out and beyond the immediacy of this place and this time.
I am fascinated by how Jaydeep uses the subject position in his poems. There are interlocutors here, and the ‘you’ or ‘she’ and even the lyric ‘I’ and ‘me’ of the poems can be read as an intimate other, as the city Kolkata, as memory or a as standing in for a broader sense of ordinary, universal, human yearning.
Such as these lines from ‘Time Ferrying Rhythms’:
I’ve known rivers going home
with ancient hand holders , faithfully
I bathed in the Euphrates when I was a child
I heard the singing of the Nile when I grew up
I took my unexpressed love to the Ganges
I rushed to the Beas when loved ones declined to speak
Unknown flowers lull me to a painless sleep
The poem with titular reference: ‘On his Rock’ is a meditation on the complexities of history, inheritance, the violences of settlement which resonate the world over as we grapple with the long tail and ongoing impacts of colonisation, of invasion, of how lands and place are transformed by a human propensity to seek, to take, to conquer. I share these lines from the poem:
You rode and rode the horse to our ancestors
piercing their land, mud houses and cattle
Imposed a name on their land, not in their tongue
unless you realized how your dhoti got maps of nations, tattered
You would chuckle, what’s in a name?
The poems also visit contemporary sites of violence and invasion, never in a didactic way but rather as an expansiveness of awareness and of the reach and role of poetry. This is poetry with long vision that is not insular nor parochial. Matthew Zapruder writes that ‘the poet transforms the material of the real in a more-or-less conscious way, in order to create a space of contemplation and imagination and possibility. Again, this is not an escape from the world around us, but a different sort of engagement’. Jaydeep invites such a variety of engagement via his poetry. I quote from ‘Notes on Loud Silences’
Gaza to Syria I hear her silence rising
on my sinful eyes without any synonym
memories unfold page after page like stories
of the twinkling stars’ (47)
Yet equal to these sharply observed geopolitical meditations are the ways in which Jaydeep’s poetry reminds us of our human propensity to care, to love, to reflect, to create. These calming lines are from his poem ‘Prayers’:
A promised sun rises as the worshippers have
come here with prayers, fruits and flowers
I allow myself to be taken in when flowers are numb-wet
with morning mist, desire dancing in hues
I spoke earlier of the words music and rhythm. I was struck many times while reading this collection of the call and response nature of the poems. Poems posit a question or a mystery which is then answered or, more accurately, echoed and responded to, in the next poem. In this way the collection reads somewhat like a long hymn or liturgical work. There is a nod to ancient form here. Such as these two poems:
‘Today’s Heat, Tomorrow’s Cold’ begins with the lines:
You may hate my sassiness,
playing with history, heroes
who ruled my land for years–
toying with emotions and borders
and continues on this theme and the following poem ‘Kalikata’ seems to answer the speculations raised:
But if each day, in each small events
you see that you are a fresh flower for me
with rare colours and hues
If your lips seek me for mine
the roads have many names
like stories, one after another
At times there is mystery and brevity in poems such as ‘Her Own Art’ quoted here in its entirety:
she was leafy,
making everything green
she was poetic,
Untitled
everything she did was angelic
her tears are easy to be seen than to decipher
It is a collection from above and below, there is a sense of constellations and also geographies, of land and waterways – rivers and rocks – and histories of words and ideas. Being as it is, a collection inspired by a city, a strong sense while reading this book is peripatetic. We are walking through the city and walking through time, with the poet as our guide. The grittiness and grace of everyday life is respectfully articulated in this poem
‘For a Rickshaw Puller’ which concludes with the lines:
Tuesday, I will write your story
with metaphors oozing
from the wounds on your breast
pulling in both hands, lean but strong
braving a couple from Sealdah
As is obvious from his body of work as a poet, scholar and teacher, Jaydeep has a deep well of knowledge about literature and poetry. Sitting underneath all of the poems in this collection and at times explicitly within them are odes to the past and to his family. I quote here from ‘For My Father’:
I see him sitting, reading and returning to my unsaid
words for him.
Searching under these old books of Mathematics
for the last place where the long
journey with my father’s hopes is complete—
Reading this collection is both a light and a rich experience. Language bounces and floats but each poem lands with a fulsome sense, demanding of the reader that they pause and give each one its due attention. Jane Hirshfield observes that:
Poetic imagination is muscular, handed, and kinesthetic. The tongue, the ear, the eye, the alertness of skin, entwine the world for which and by which they come into being, and of which each is part. In its musics, its objects, its strategies of speech, thought, and feeling, a poem plucks the interconnection of the experiencing self and all being.
Jaydeep has gifted us with a musical, geographical, attentive and entwined book that seeks and finds interconnections throughout. It has been an honour to read and I now, with great delight, declare Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock launched here in Naarm/Melbourne.
References:
- Hirshfield J (2015) Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Knopf, New York.
- Sarangi J (2026) Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock, Black Eagle Books, Dublin OH.
- Zapruder M (2018) Why Poetry, Ecco, New York.
– Emilie Collyer
Emilie Collyer lives and writes on unceded Wurundjeri Country. She has two poetry collections published by Vagabond Press: Do you have anything less domestic? (winner Five Islands Prize) and As If I’m Really There. Her poetry has been recognised in Newcastle (third prize in 2026), Gwen Harwood (shortlisted 2026) and the Judith Wright poetry prizes. Her play Super won the Drama category of the 2026 Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards and she is currently under commission with The Street Theatre (Canberra).
Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock by Jaydeep Sarangi is available from https://www.blackeagle books.org/ product/notes-on-the-rock-of-job-charnock/
