Gopal Lahiri’s SELECTED POEMS Review
Uncover the depth of Gopal Lahiri’s sensitive poetry! In this review of Gopal Lahiri’s SELECTED POEMS, Navamalati Neog Chakraborty, explores the award-winning Kolkata poet’s insights on nature, heritage, and the human condition.
The Kolkata bilingual poet, Gopal Lahiri, who has been honoured with the 2024 Jayanta Mahapatra National Award, has in this new collection of some ninety poems and twelve haikus, in Selected Poems, sung about our heritage in this God gifted world of nature, where man find himself muse thoughtfully, and sparingly in a speculative way. Poetry is for very good poet the expression of the whole of his sensitive life, in his own words to express his feelings. It begins from childhood and Lahiri terms the words of his pen, as his alphabets. His earlier collection, Alleys are Filled with Future Alphabets, are expressive about him, the soft-spoken poet, whose poetic reach far exceeds his grasp. He states that the very way the humpback camels move in the desert amidst the sand-dunes in an awkward avowal of movement, he too as a poet has come out of his self (Crossing the Shoreline) to express himself…Go and receive thyself. It is thus that Adrienne Rich had said that, Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, and restore numbed zones.
When Lahiri states that, Words vanish like Houdini when I need them (Conversation), we realise a masterly retreat of a poet into his self. He whispers out as his eyes search for myths on the café walls, as his need to express himself coalesce around him in silence (Story Elements). He is the philosopher’s poet who hears the oriole’s sing, the sparrows chirp and in the quiet of his mind, verses flower near the bedside. The poet in him go through a continuous search, noting the world of the red ants seeking earth.
The evening sky repeats a smile that burns
and comes through unknown stars. (Search)
Lahiri’s poems wrap up within them the symbolic value of living that course through his veins. No wonder he concludes in Shoals of Love, that I am inventing a life I can live with. His metaphors sit upright to talk of feelings rooted. Reading his poems one feel that our heritage breathes right there within our veins, leaving our senses to iterate our breath and feelings. Thus, the poet within him states that the evening sky smiles, as unknown stars light up its bosom; while in Whisper, he begins his poem with the affirmation that, Smile is a paper-thin feeling ready to escape. Lahiri’s readers may be thrown into consternation at not being able to follow him all the way. But then all poets are not alike, some are relaxed while others are concentrated. Lahiri’s is concentrated.
The verbs that sit as the titles for his poems…Whisper, Search, Traverse, Change, have in their hold their messages. Yes, the poet who converses with silence has within his persona moonlit nights draped in mist, for there is no soft warm romance to fall back upon, but the weight of the world’s chaos, singing a quiet raga. Even his ivy creeper lies strangled in a fence. The poet in him realises that the onus is on him to accept the magic that the world holds within its grip (Whisper).
His Grandma’s Kitchen is grandly sensuous poem with the look and smell and taste of kathi rolls and la burrito, or rustic stew. But these fads in India are all of modern times. In Grandpa’s Wheelchair, the poet brings in not the red ant but a black ant that crawls into the old man’s hand, and he could hear his firm baritone suggest, Youth is full of joy and wisdom. Gopal Lahiri hears, haikus dropping in, in silence…
in the middle of nowhere
my mind lapses into stillness
peace and harmony still evade me.
The poet who was searching for myths on café walls, finds in his Transition, no stories written on walls, for Every musical note, /even the abstract holds its silence. He has something to say, something very meaningful. Cautionary. The world will not be the same without those who built it. There lies the poet’s tenor of response to the world he stands agape for he finds the city emptying, the skylines dim. The poet’s persona is reflected in Selected Poems, which Sanjeev Sethi sharply noted.
His haikus are very meaningfully rolled out. Somewhere in the 7th haiku that he presents in this collection, I pick up his touch of grief for the jewelled land of Manipur, where all has gone awry. If poems are statements where the sensitive poet has a tearful eye to shed and an echoing pulsating heart that beats, we can understand…
the leaders are walking
towards us
with bags of promise and poison
Indeed, the alleyways of Lahiri’s poems will always wait for future alphabets. Thus, the poet shuffles his feet, and with crisp and simple words find a cool breeze touch his face. His My Poem take shape within a mothy room, even as he slides into the evening on the back of a dream, his stanzas stuck and sulking but reverting back, crisp and plain.
Selected Poems bring out the poet’s persona, where his bare sentences fall apart, as he states his reflections…all loveless. Even as memories crowd his lane with alphabets, the poet reflects, and sees his reflection reflected on a broken mirror. This makes his alphabets metaphorically poise as words, that refuse to rush in a wild swathe of thoughts. His summer sky melts, boats ferry away, and the piano notes solemnly spell out lazy idioms. That’s how the poet wills us to find him, even as his imageries tend to make freedom an uneasy word, a revolving truth. Don’t let the road rollers fool you: this is the road constructed on unheard graves during the war (Traverse), and in Transitory Moments he looks back at bedtime verses, scribbled poetry, small shops selling marbles and lollipops. That’s about childhood time, but the sulking poet grows up to find the black coffee turn cold, cigarettes burn to ashes and words hide behind the clustered stems. Each moment of the poet’s life is a pinhole, showing the largest canvas possible and the poet in him spread out the entirety of life’s stillness.
In Selected Poems, let us not be critical about the glum face of expectancy posing in an impassive face, for the poet in him with his cognitive psychology colludes in his silence. They are deeply felt realizations. Life has a plethora of factors different for every poet, different crests and troughs, and of course a different truth to present. Lahiri gravitates towards his world. They are inseparable.
Book Details:
- Title: Selected Poems
- Author: Gopal Lahiri
- Publisher: CLASSIX (an imprint of Hawakal)
- Release Date: 3 August 2025
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 128 pages
- ISBN 10: 8198842462
- ISBN 13:978-8198842466
- Price: Rs 650
- Where to buy: www.amazon.in/Selected-Poems-Gopal-Lahiri/dp/8198842462
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