Reviewed by Naina Dey
Anemone Morning and other poems
By Gopal Lahiri
Penprints
April 2024, Paperback, 140 pages, INR 350, ISBN 978-819679321-0
‘There are only two elements here, beauty and truth’ – wrote Kahlil Gibran and so it stands with the prestigious Jayanta Mahapatra National Award recipient Gopal Lahiri’s latest publication from Penprints titled Anemone Morning and other poems. The book is divided into five unequal sections labelled “Resurrection”, “Dreamers’ Search – Green Path”, “Mind’s Eye”, “Miscellany” and “Haibun”, in which he plays with multiple poetic forms ranging from the conventional blank verse to gogyoshi, haiku, senryu and haibun. The book is a dreamer’s search for peace and silence in the mind’s quest for spiritual enlightenment. Lahiri explores transcendence while being compassionate and appreciative of his natural surroundings and daily responsibilities. Silence loses its blind opacity as he delves into its depths and finds a summing up of an entire life:
There is a sense of loss at first, soon followed by
a quiet lilting epiphany,
an unheard music, a divine disclosure. (“Single Sleep”, 16)
The poet’s soul finds revival in dreams, in music, in ‘incomplete prayers’ and memories – a revival that makes it perceive peace and harmony in the universal being. Though many of Lahiri’s poems veer to the sublime, there are moments when he is content to remain a keen observer of nature’s secrets. Therefore, in “Red Hibiscus”, the poet describes the flower with a botanist’s eye – an extraordinary combination:
My red hibiscus shines in the tropical sunlight,
but she wants to sleep in shades
under the umbrella or shade cloth,
fine trumpet shaped petals and the orange tip
stamens fuse into a tube with
spiny pollens and fruit capsules. (29)
Lahiri’s love for nature is further reinforced in his use of colours in “River”:
There is colour in all of us.
Now the sun begins to move and
the sky turns from mauve to pale purple,
tentative, transient, even unreal (37)
-superimposing the colours without on the colours within, leading to a divine revelation as Tagore had done in his poem “Ami”:
My consciousness has tinted the emerald green,
And made the ruby blush
…I beheld the rose and said ‘Beautiful’,
And beautiful she became.
(Translation mine)
It is in the tiniest action that Lahiri finds the path to the eternal. Thus, watching the line of ants, he observes:
I see the ant line, they carry crumbs of soil
this way and that way,
They are ordinary, the common, the very own.
How humble their efforts
How tiny their strengths,
It’s a journey just beginning (“Universe”, 24)
In the second section of the book, while he surrounds himself with a cloak of silence, interiorizing his thoughts, his self, to attain the calmness that comes from meditation and brings within its purview the external objects, Lahiri is acutely aware of the destructive role that human irresponsibility plays in global warming, and the danger of human extinction. Thus, poems like “First Page”, “Acceptance”, “End Game” and “Annihilation” reveal the ongoing environmental crisis that is contrasted with the almost Tennysonian presentation of an idyllic natural world in “Change” – ‘Here the flowers live and die in silence’. (53)
The third section “Mind’s Eye” brings out the squalor and starkness of city life in poems like “Hunger”, “Water” and “Amnesia” and nostalgia for the bygone days whose trivialities offer solace in depressing times:
I know home has a special place in my childhood,
the brick wall, courtyard, corridor,
swell with dream, days, and nights –
flowers in the pot – lavender, yellow, violet. (“Stay Alight”, 79)
Just as the anemone is both the harbinger of spring and a symbol of death and decay, Lahiri’s Anemone Morning embraces mutability and change as inevitable parts of an existence in which even the commonplace can for a fleeting moment be ‘A small knocking at the centre of all life’.
gunān etān atītya trīn
dehī dehasamudhavān
janmamrtyujarāduhkhair
vimukto ’mrtam aśnute
(When the embodied soul rises above the three modes of goodness, passion and dullness that spring from the body, it is freed from birth , death, old age and pain and attains life eternal) – says the Bhagavadgita 14:20, and Gopal Lahiri offers contentment as the key to mental tranquility:
Accept the good life and be happy.
Accept too, each action, each spoken word (“Peace”, 23)-and beyond light and dark, memory and silence – ‘It’s all bliss, it’s all peace at the end.’ (“Armistice”, 38)
About the reviewer: Dr. Naina Dey is a widely anthologised critic, translator and creative writer. She has authored numerous literary and academic articles in noted journals, books and newspapers. Her books include Macbeth: Critical Essays, Edward the Second: Critical Studies, Real and Imagined Women: The Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon, Representations of Women in George Eliot’s Fiction, Macbeth: Exploring Genealogies and three books of poetry titled Snapshots from Space and Other Poems, Homing Pigeons and sundry stuff and Crimson Corset: poems on love. Her translations include Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s “Gupi Gain O Bagha Bain”, and One Dozen Stories. She has lately published her debut book of short stories named The Poltergeist and other short stories. She was awarded the “Excellence in World Poetry Award, 2009 by the International Poets Academy, Chennai and was among a team of young Indian writers felicitated jointly by Sahitya Akademi and Visva-Bharati University in 2010. She is functioning as member of editorial board of several literary bodies and is currently Eastern Zonal Secretary of The Shakespeare Society of India, New Delhi. She is concept creator of literary and artistic organ Chamunda’s Dream.