This collection of the briefer poems of  Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) offers an accessible introduction to the Bengali writer’s work.  Concise, aphoristic and profound, Particles, Jottings, Sparks is enriched by William Radice’s insightful approach, augmenting the translations with informative and scholarly biographical notes.

Tagore’s desire to write an epic constituting an expression of the fullness of his vision was not to be.  Rather, Radice observes, his Particles have the ‘potential for the whole’.  In some respects this has something in common with Modernism in the west.  Fragmented moments and abstractions, in which the large is expressed through the small, must be seen from the point of view of the work as a whole.  No.98, which concludes ‘the driver behind is my previous me’ is instantly abstruse.  While the aphorism seems simple and image-dependent, it is also multiplicitous in a decidedly eastern way.  It is about reincarnation, while concurrently observing a whole self that passes through the rebirth of every moment.

Jottings are different and more aphoristic again.  No. 160, for example, maintains macrocosmic –microcosmic imagery.  The sea, and a ‘crazy’ desire to ‘scoop it out’, are reconciled by the order to repose.  We should not worry about the nature of the cosmos: it is unfolding as it should-as perhaps, are we.  Sparks is, Radice observes, more general in its implications.  Based on occasions in some way significant enough to trigger reflections, they leave the occasion itself behind.  Meaning, here, is what is remembered when an event and the words it inspires are forgotten.

Sparks No. 196 is a beautiful example that encapsulates Tagore’s philosophy.  It concludes: ‘the poet was a lover, life-long.’  There is absolute transience to everything in the poem: the various seasonal rebirths of a tree within its own life, the ‘passing’ wayfarer and the poet himself who passes through both world and poem.  All action and thought arrives at the undisputable knowledge that what remains in the material world will stand testimony to a life of love, once that life has concluded.  Nothing can ever change the fact that we were here, and loved.

Particles, Jottings, Sparks is intricate but refreshing. Initially the poems seem to offer an alternative version to the western modernism.  But these similarities start to crumble under the weight of absolute certaintanties.  Tagore’s work is, in fact, a profound expression that above the cosmos and its process, detachment-his own poetic ideal-could lead to realignment with the source and absolute, pure consciousness.