Dr. Kalpna Rajput, Shajahanpur

Experience and reminiscence are the integral part of content in verse and the poet’s honesty in expressing his/her ideas when mixed on a single standpoint, it becomes the poetry with the message of love and peace, the most required human instinct, which is unfortunately lacking in human figures. The poetry of Hamza Hassan Sheikh mingles all the shades of life i.e. nature, senses, sorrow, animal, peace, love, hate and sympathy. Previously, his collection of poems Some Moments of Love gained wide acclaim for the natural outflow of thoughts and simple language. The present collection Museum of Reminiscence dedicated to R. K. Singh consists of sixty poems and thoughts of some scholars and critics of the world on his first collection of poems. For him, reminiscences weave the whole fabric of life and in his poetical preface, he says:

Strolling in the starlight or rambling in the moonlight, these memories embosom to kindle a fire inside you, and then you open the door of the museum and hug these idols. When all around quietude and whole world is is unconscious from surroundings. You adore these idols with the blessing of your dreams. Gradually your nights begin to pass in such a way and these idols become soulful and grief-sharer. (Preface)

Most of Hamza’s poems are drenched in unexcelled beauty of nature and the human emotions peeping here and there from the nature’s blessings remind us the God’s benevolence ever showering on us. ‘My Scattered Dream’ is a beautiful poem in which the poet attempts to draw a picture of transitoriness of human feelings. When the butterfly interrupts and allures him and in chasing it, his canvas dashes to the ground but still the heart dares weaving dreams, so in ‘Heart’s City’ a simple sight keeps him busy for a long time and ‘the chimes go on ringing/ lamp burns all night long/ blazing with someone’s memories.’ (20) And again, the poet feels the same tormentation from the person to whom he loves deeply which results in poet’s abhorrence for his own self. The poem ‘Diamond’ is the real exploration of the world of paradoxes where ‘keeping a lot of diamonds’ with ‘no courage to reveal/ those to the world/and those keep glimmering/in lonely rooms’ (28) is a man of status and a poor labourer ‘who works in burning sun/ has lot of tiny diamonds/adorning his forehead’ (29) is a sinner but this sinner is a boon to the nation rather a rich man discussed above.  Man’s utter longing to attain the perfect happiness (immortality) becomes a dream merely when he ends his life in searching it in the material world as Alexender, the great conqueror of the world did but his quest for immortality proved futile when he ‘search(ed) for the water of immortality/to be alive forever.’ (38)

Hamza’s love poems seem to express the unfulfilled longings of a lover who with a pure heart and hope to find the similar love is still wandering in this world of wrongs and ultimately his heart turns into ‘arid desert/ without boundaries’.(50) In this dark and din, peace appears the final goal of the poet when he gives a message of peace to the humanity:

Let us be its survivor

And messenger too.

To warble on livid sky

Like a dove. (56)

The poems like ‘Cemetery’, ‘Departed Leaves’, ‘Life’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Gem’ and ‘The Journey with Life’ bear the philosophic strain. The poem ‘I Wonder’ is satiric in tone because the poet has relinquished the hope of a lest weal in common man’s life.  The placements of Quatrains at intervals remind the recurring theme of the poems and these poems can also be marked for taking out the maladies of human life with the poetic devices of narration, dialogue, imagery, rhyming and fine symbolism. The book is nicely jacketed in symbolic image. I hope, each poem of the collection will be an awakening to the strayed humanity.