Review Text in Indonesian

Listening to rhyme after rhyme in this book brings sadness to Saras Dewi's song: Gazing up at the purple sky in Bali, and I realized how precious your memories are. When my soul is limitless, free to repeat the time punks. Saras Dewi, through “Kekasih Teluk” and “Lembayung Bali”, her old songs fifteen years ago, expresses the same anxiety. One through the song, another through poetry. He remembers and worries about Bali as his hometown.
We will find romanticism in the poems of Saras Dewi. Saras Dewi admits that this book of poems, “Beloved of the Bay”, is a kind of thank you to Teluk Benoa, Bali. Saras Dewi was born in Denpasar, then left Bali and taught philosophy at the University of Indonesia. Since teaching, Saras Dewi has complained that her life is like a philosophical machine that is spent everyday building solid and logical arguments.
His poetic sense was taken away, replaced by the noise of the city that demanded routine and monotony. For Saras Dewi, “My days with Teluk Benoa are intimacy that fills the soul with hope. He renewed my life, reconnected the love that had been separated from my hometown.”
Being an academic does not make Saras Dewi distant from Bali or activism. Saras Dewi is an intellectual who feels it is impossible to just stay in the house of knowledge, namely the university. Saras Dewi doesn't want to be like the intellectual plural in Indonesia who are comfortable in the ivory tower with a degree, dignity, or academic work.
At least the poem "Rumah Ilmu" emphasizes that. Although knowledge is said to provide a comfortable space for books covered, not being involved in the “string of misery”, according to him, is a form of evil. A humble intellectual figure is also very strong in the poem "Fear". Saras Dewi feels thoughts are blocking her freedom and “knowledge does not save me” (p.31)
Refusing Reclamation
We know that for the past years, Saras Dewi has become an environmental activist. He is active in the Bali Reject Reclamation movement. Can be said rhymeHis rhyme in “Kekasih Teluk” is nothing but a form of his poetic expression of his activism. Dewi's rhyme rhymes to fight. His poems are an articulation of his rejection of the reclamation of Benoa Bay that he, "Does not want humans to win in a fight that is not in balance with nature."
Saras Dewi in the poem entitled "Mother" continues, Because if they win, it means they have lost / Because they actually killed / Their own mother. Nature is the mother of humans. Humans are born and raised with nature. In the poem, the greed and arrogance of humans in nature is like a child who disobeys, even kills his mother. Not only "ibuism" in describing the intimate relationship between humans and nature. Saras Dewi often personifies nature: the singing of dolphins, the glow of dogs' eyes, the sea, mountains, seagrass beds, trees, wind, twilight, and the rush of rivers. Human religion, for Saras Dewi, is written in the strokes of the trunks of giant trees (p. 21). Inevitably, the I-the poet in his poems seems to have chosen religion in nature.
Not only that, "beloved", as a metaphorical expression for Benoa Bay or Sanur, reverberates in each of his poems. For example in the last line of the rhyme "Love The Most Noble One”, Saras Dewi wrote, Love is the bay/And the bay is me. Joko Pinurbo in the introduction to the book said that the last line in the poem is so intimate, it is nothing but appreciation of the love relationship between humans and nature. In nature, humans find their self-image, and in themselves, humans feel the currents and pulsations of nature (p. 16).
Humans and nature
This book of poetry also complements Saras Dewi's previous book, Ekophenomenology (2015). The book is a study of Saras Dewi's philosophy which elaborates in depth on the balance between human and natural relations. Saras Dewi borrows Martin Heidegger's phenomenological thinking on the criticism of humans who feel they are subjects and treat nature only as objects. Exploitation by humans overrides the existence of nature. Nature is only used as a means of satisfying human interests. We can find the harmony of Saras Dewi's view of nature in both of her books. In ecophenomenology, Benoa Bay is not just a bay but also butterflies, fish, coral reefs, green turtles, and cranes there.
Accordingly, this book of poetry by Saras Dewi is important to remind us of the phenomenological meaning of the compassionate relationship between humans and nature. His poems are not only romantic, but also indicate his concern for development in Bali, especially the reclamation that has caused natural damage in Benoa Bay. The poem "The Birth of Anarchy" is the embodiment of his stance against reclamation. Saras Dewi rhymes, Anarchy was born from a child, / who took his father's hand, / trotted barefoot, shouting "Bali refuses reclamation".
This book of poems validates Saras Dewi as an intellectual as well as an observer of nature. Saras Dewi's love for science is as great as ethos and eros against various forms of human arrogance in nature. In addition, the poems collected in his poetry book are also incarnated by Dewi's memories of the past in Bali. Poetry becomes a battle of resistance as well as memories of families, homes, temples, bays, beaches, and trees. Saras Dewi agrees as in the poem entitled "Pomegranate":/so that everything is in me/ awake in me.