Silence leaps, seeps in Anemone Morning and Other Poems by Gopal Lahiri

There are certain usual ‘drowsy metaphors’ of poetry which, if harnessed well with a surplus of imaginative insight, can yield quasi-magical poems, enough to transport its readers to a hypnotic mystical world. Silence and slowness are two such familiar measures which Gopal Lahiri as a poet often re-lapses into to offer new unheralded spectral possibilities of space and sound.

In ‘Anemone Morning and Other Poems’, he divides his poetic arc into clearly defined segments: Resurrection, Dreamer’s Search — Green Path, Mind’s Eye, Miscellany and, finally, the Haibun.

In the first section, he resurrects the defunct romantic register with rare luminosity and brilliance, which only a poet who is too ready to surrender to the intensity of experience can possibly do. Solitude is not a vacuous state of mind sans any possibility of self-discovery. For him, ‘each moment is a pin-hole’ that reveals to him ‘the largest canvas possible’.

He invents situations for his own replenishment. He shuts his eyes and then opens them immediately to feel ‘a sense of loss at first, soon followed by/a quiet lilting epiphany,/an unheard music, a divine disclosure’. In lines such as these, Lahiri sounds almost like a forlorn Keats in his after-life clamouring to be heard, all over again.

Lahiri is unabashedly slow. This is his poetic vanity as well as virtue. Slowness affords him the necessary leisure and laxity to delve deep into the recesses of quietness. In the second section of the collection, the poet turns all the more inwards — towards that intimate sanctum sanctorum of the self that he thinks is still intact and invasion-proof. This is how he celebrates the profundity of slow time:

Seed, sprout and bloom — all we want as they say

a kind of silent symphony,

all of it a triumph, a voice upon keys upon strings.

Slowness is expressed through the corresponding semiotics of stillness, sleepiness, stoniness and half-listening. Lahiri’s whispers are soulful, and his stillness is no less stormy. His low-pitched romantic reveries have an undercurrent of concern and care. While his night bird seeks to reach the top of the tree, among the clouds which are ‘like Frost’s/hairy’ skies, it comes face-to-face with the harsh reality of inhaling the toxic air. ‘Now each breath/slows him down, like too many medicines’.

In his third section, we come across a cerebral and a much more grounded Lahiri, who knows the poetic limits of pastoral symphonies. The spectres of hunger, war, slavery begin to haunt him, and ‘the sounds of siren’ intersect with the sounds of piano. The slums, the trenches, the garbage heaps, raging coal fires, the jail museum, the smell of gunpowder and many such sites and sleazy smells seem to overtake the seductive anemone mornings that Lahiri otherwise celebrates in the rest of the collection.

In the penultimate section, Lahiri shows his control of poetic craft as he tries Japanese verse forms such as haiku (three-line poems of five, seven and five syllables), gogyoshi (five-line poems with a title), and senryu (known as the comic cousin of haiku).

The last section consists of six prose poems, each ending with a haiku. In these poems, too, it is the silence that ‘surges forward. It hushes, leaps, seeps’.

— The writer teaches English at Panjab University