Reviewed by Aparna Singh
Gopal Lahiri Selected Poems
Selected by Sanjeev Sethi
CLASSIX (An imprint of Hawakal)
Aug 2025, ISBN: 978-81-988424-0-4, ₹650, 128 pages
To read a much-acclaimed poet is always a challenge that requires an emotionally and intellectually charged mindscape for the reader. Further, unravelling a selected collection attentively culled from a body of work written over one and a half decades adds more to it. The poet Gopal Lahiri and the reader-selector Sanjeev Sethi, also an award-winning poet, come together in this assiduously curated collection that is breathtaking in its depth and diversity. The frame available to the reader is filtered through the consciousness of the mediator poet who, beckoned as he is, from his habitual nightly sleep by a “matutinal email” from poet publisher Kiriti Sengupta to collate a collection of Gopal Lahiri’s selected poems. This passing piece of information might have slipped unnoticed except that, as readers, we become participants in a carefully constructed reading experience. The collection, hence, anticipates layered insights and multiple frames.
At the receiving end of a meticulously assorted collection, we begin with questions that gently nudge us along: How easy or difficult was the selection process? As Sethi himself mentions – “Selectors have to be brutal” – one wonders what egged him on this exacting journey. Immersed in this intriguing curatorial process, the reader joins the poetic journey with bated breath – as much a “serious task” as writing poetry itself is.
In the first poem, ‘Crossing the Shoreline, ’ Lahiri, the environmentalist, comes forth. Almost dramatic in its foreboding, the poem cautions the readers at the very outset – “Darkness lingers in sleep/ dreamland disappears”, as before long the “unmolested trees” will cease to give shade of “love and light”. Lahiri’s poems are unequivocally critical of an anthropocentric world. ‘Annihilation’ is a warning signpost on the fallout of climate change that is captured with clinical precision. The “silver lily” lifts its “tired feet and floats”, signalling the impending impact of shrinking “rivers” and the slow but inevitable destruction of the “spreading roots, seeds and earthlings” by the “jungle of concrete”. This reflects Lahiri’s clearly articulated concerns in the preface – “this collection of poems showcases a range of forms, styles, themes, and emotions, offering glimpses into … the beauty of nature, and concerns for the ecosystem.”
Ambivalently poised between “words”, “letters”, and “alphabets”, Lahiri attempts to navigate a foggy linguistic miasma. As one transitions from ‘Story Elements’ to ‘Conversation’ words, the silent bystanders vanish “like Houdini”, especially when they are needed the most. Lahiri’s relationship with language is an evolving one, one that is driven by the everlasting desire for peace over chaos. This leads to a haunting self-reflexive vulnerability in ‘My Poem’ as “alphabets wait like a patient for the touch of my hands”.
Some of these poems encapsulate an elusive interiority. ‘Search’, a poem of yearning, quickly drifts from “clouds” carrying “all the whiteness” to “walls of broken embraces”. In the poetic space that Lahiri weaves the natural and the human engage in intimate dialogues, configuring an inseparable continuum; a seamless coexistence.
Often the poems are deeply philosophical – “Smile is a paper-thin feeling/ ready to escape”. Love and heartbreak come with caveats; words may not always offer conciliation as the poet gathers whispers “into a magic box/ silent but loud”. Love might transcend the limited constraints of time and space, dissolving difference into sameness, but Lahiri, wary of unrealistic optimism, steps in – “A line still exists between us”. The euphoria of met or unmet expectations waits to be unlocked as the poet forges “lines and half-lines” digging for some elusive answer. ‘Orphan Smile’ begins with the stars who are finding it hard to weave the story of an orphan trapped in a web of memory. Poems like these morph into social commentaries, but not of the self-conscious kind. This is what makes this collection an authentic tryst with the irreducible realities of existence. The desire to remain relevant, to keep writing as the ‘unacknowledged legislator’ of this world, has impugned poets from times immemorial. Lahiri too grapples with ‘Absences’, the fear of invisibility, the sentences “losing grammar” as “love dies slowly on the blank page”. In ‘Poetry Mirror’, he agonises over words that perish in transit – “My words can’t reach you, alphabets rustle,/ I am watching all these through my broken mirror”. Lahiri bares the poet’s vulnerable self in’Transitory Moments’ – “The black coffee turns cold, cigarettes burn to ashes,/ words hide behind the clustered stems.” Amidst this fraught engagement with language, and its suspect validity, the poem ‘Freedom’ resonates with a dystopian candour –
Freedom is still an uneasy word.
Before the utterance,
remove the crust of the magic letters.
Let it release its subtle essence.
Let the freedom bubble burst.
Often the poems transition from a contemplative philosophical fervour to an embracing inclusivity, an attentiveness that is as composed as it is stark – “Don’t let the road rollers fool you; this is the road constructed on unheard graves during the war.”
The poems bear witness to self-explorations, to intuitive self-revelations, to the workings of memory at times immediate, at times fleeting. Although most of the poems wear a distant objective gaze, Lahiri can effortlessly slip into private spaces, into a nuanced material world steeped in nostalgia: ‘Grandpa’s Wheelchair’ warmly paints a conversation between the grandpa and the grandchild, that metaphorically underscores the journey from youth to old age. ‘Grandma’s Piano’ is a graphic reconstruction of “the corner room, lonely and deserted” where “Grandma’s lean fingers are a syllable of rust”. What distinguishes this poem from being one steeped in romanticised wistfulness is its emotional intensity sans platitude. The honesty of expression imbues it with a visceral vitality –
I imagine your absence is like your presence here daily
while the stars scrape their skins on the open windows
The selection closes with the haiku section that reinforces Lahiri’s mastery of form. They encapsulate myriad emotional registers: the bounty of nature, love, childhood, politics, natural disaster, the creative journey, deprivation, and so much more waiting to be unpacked as more reading experiences contribute to this comprehensive collage of “variegated images”.
This carefully curated selection reveals Gopal Lahiri as a poet of remarkable range—equally attentive to ecological precarity, linguistic fragility, philosophical inquiry, social consciousness, and the intimate afterlives of memory. Moving seamlessly across expansive meditations and compressed lyrical forms like haiku, Lahiri crafts a poetic universe where language becomes both witness and wound, archive and awakening. This collection is not merely an assemblage of selected poems; it is an immersive cartography of a poetic consciousness shaped by wonder, disquiet, nostalgia, and ethical urgency.
About the reviewer: Aparna Singh (PhD) is an academic, poet, and short story writer. She works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Diamond Harbour Women’s University. She has four edited volumes to her credit and has worked as a copyeditor with Sahitya Akademi. She is one of the authors of the poetry collection Three Witches’ Songs and the author of the short story collection Periodic Tales, which won the Nissim International Special Mention Award 2024. She regularly publishes reviews with The Statesman, and Muse India.