Review: Harmony: The Saga of the Earth by Apala Banerjee

Harmony: The Saga of the Earth by Apala Banerjee is a moving collection of poems and illustrations celebrating nature and urging readers to take action to save the planet. The teenage poet focuses on issues ranging from pollution to war, animal cruelty to capitalism, while also imbuing her writing with a joyful and passionate approach to life.

As the title suggests, this book is about the balance of nature, something we have lost in our own relationship to the natural world. However, this work doesn’t only express the nostalgia and sadness for our loss as a species, it raises political questions and highlights contemporary problems, without forgetting the love and fascination for natural beauty that have inspired the poems.

Beauty in this book is not meant as something ornamental or superficial – it is the result of harmony, which brings unity, sincerity, compassion, responsibility, and awareness of every living thing. As such, the topics match perfectly with the poetry, a medium in which form and content have to become perfectly synchronized. From quotidian scenes, like a walk in the woods, the poet distills drops of poetic beauty as everyday life is colored with a thrilling sense of awe and wonder.

Many of the situations found in these poems are recognizable, but Banerjee also allows the reader a glimpse of the surreal in her many personifications of the natural world, where the elements become characters with their own will, such as trees full of envy or pride, and the sun puzzling us with the riddle of its existence. Banerjee opens with a series of odes to the seasons – the landscape preparing for winter, and then blossoming again in spring and summer, which establishes the poetic form that remains consistent throughout the collection. The poems are in free verse, without specific traditional forms, but they are also very musical, with regular rhyme patterns that help ground the reader to the text.

In the second, shorter section, the poet moves from the general wonders of nature to the details of her home state, Georgia, celebrating its varied wildlife. In the third section, longer than the previous two, the poet matures the themes touched on in the first two sections to shed light on her political and poetic view on the current environmental crisis. Although from time to time the poetic form or the political arguments could come across as overly idealistic, it is the spontaneity and the unmistakable authenticity of the poetry that carries it forward. The illustrations, which are well-matched with the poems but a bit more simplistically rendered than the poetry itself, give the book a fully realized vision – single-minded, sincere, and unpretentious.

All told, Harmony is an eloquent and inspiring collection, illustrating a deep awareness of the critical situation facing our planet, but also an unshakeable faith in a better future – a dichotomy that is handled with care and nuance. Urgent, delicate, and free-spirited, this second collection by the poet reveals a core sensitivity and impressive facility with the form.