Over the years, Gopal Lahiri has carved a niche for himself as an accomplished bilingual poet, writing in English and Bengali, in a distinctive style of his own. His poems summon up real and imagined states of being, ‘how the world is and how it should be’ (11), moving between inner and outer realms with deceptive ease. Big questions and the minutest of details, are of equal importance in his uniquely personal poetic universe. Selected Poems offers us glimpses of his English poetry as it has evolved over time, through different phases of his chequered writing trajectory.

 

For Gopal Lahiri, words are constant companions, as real as his experience as a geologist. In fact, he insists that these two facets of his work have a lot in common, demanding imagination, flexibility and willingness to explore the new (interview with Sanjeev Sethi in Tuck, 2016). ‘Poetry is the diary I always carry with me’, he declares in the Preface (10). Language assumes a palpable presence in some of his poems, functioning as an entity in its own right: ‘In the café, we sit at the corner/ back to the wall. / There, just you, me. / And the drowsy metaphors’ (‘Other Side,’ 63).

The selections in this volume are not the poet’s own. The poems are chosen by another poet, Sanjeev Sethi, who confesses that the ‘process was no picnic’ (9). Faced with the difficult task, Sethi tells us, he decided to focus on ‘a celebration of images’, in ‘all their hold and heft’ (9). Indeed, certain graphic images haunt the reader’s memory even after closing the book: ‘Endless rows of beds awaiting bodies/ like a science fiction movie’ (‘Transition’, 115); ‘Night’s piranha swallows the pale moon’ (‘Forever’, 91); ‘Some nights are dark and harsh/ no edges of the wheelchair are softened’ (‘Grandpa’s Wheelchair’, 35).
 

The concreteness of these images offsets the deeply philosophical, sometimes almost mystical overtones that we also encounter in Gopal Lahiri’s poetry. A mellow wistfulness suffuses some of the poems, expressing a haunting sense of the passage of time: “Those yellow pencils/ grow old with me/ and my words” (‘Haiku’, 127). In ‘Biography’, ‘the evening weaves/ leftover handshakes’ (27).

 

Though written in English, some poems carry multilingual overtones, drawing upon different tongues and diverse traditions. The experience of a seasoned world traveller reveals itself in the fusion of languages and cultures in his poetry. In a haiku poem, for instance, English, Japanese and Bengali elements coalesce:

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wet shiuli flowers
on your tiny petri dish
sharing my puja

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It is worth remembering that the writer of these lines is not only a bilingual poet but also a translator.

 

The poems derive much of their impact from their fascination with contraries. The vocabulary tends to be intensely compressed, yet often evokes expansive ramifications. Concrete settings inspire musings that shade off into abstractions, creating alternative topographies. In ‘Lodhi Garden’ for instance, ‘Knowing so little/ the rows of Buddha palm flag the/ evening rays in silence’ (106).
 

Even in poems that focus on the human condition, the natural world is never far away. As presence and as metaphor, it remains an actor in the drama: ‘where I live, where roses open/ their petals like soft sighs and shine/ in rich accents of colour’ (‘Triptych’, 49). In ‘Autumn Muse (Kashmir Valley),’ the tautness of the political atmosphere spills over into the natural world, creating an electric aura:

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The autumn wind drums in the night
In repressed anger and in the distance
The stars bunch on the very edge
Of the bank lulled by the swash
And welters of the falling leaves. (97)

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The encroachment of technology haunts the landscape with the threat of extinction:

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A jungle of concrete will slowly destroy
the spreading roots, seeds, and earthlings,
the animated hymn of birdsong.
There will be no one to carry them
back to their silent, natural way.

(Annihilation, 47)

The prophetic pronouncement hints at an apocalyptic vision.

 

No doubt at such moments, the outlook appears bleak. Yet, in Gopal Lahiri’s poetic universe, the human spirit persists. The will to love emerges as the saving grace. Despite the unitary impact of single images and some individual poems, the cumulative statement of the volume, drawing upon the gradual accretion of detail, emotion and idea, can be summed up in the poet’s insistence that in spite of everything, ‘I still love. I promise I still love’ (88).