Mandira reviews Gopal Lahiri’s eighth English collection, Anemone Morning, which combines poetic voice with contemplative verses, exclusively for Different Truths, examining nature, consciousness, and the universe’s contradictions.
Anemone Morning and Other Poems is the eighth collection of verses, in English, of Gopal Lahiri, an internationally known, award-winning, bilingual poet writing in English and Bengali.
Verses are like silent whispers set into lyrics in lyres when they awaken the innate ability of the spirit of the cosmos in the morning and go into deep meditation and sleep at night.
moonlight
the night strums
a few chords...
And then, the morning arrives for the poet to meditate, and dawn too arrives for him to contemplate:
At the edge of Anemone morning
I fold my palms and then start meditating.
Before that, the poet watched:
one by one, the tiny stars melt at midnight
...
a vibrant emptiness dissolves in my breath.
In his contemplative self amid bountiful nature, moving and sensitive verses make individuals simultaneously remorseful and joyous. According to the poet, “Everything has a soul.” How very true. The poet, it seems, is talking of quantum consciousness.
From mundane, they get transformed into sublime, transforming earthly lives into sublime hymns:
twilight skies
smear those colours
with my hands.
The use of such words as binary sends to the readers another direction of the poet – his contradictory emphasis of science and metaphysics in his wonderful verses.
Sentences like ‘Flowers live and die in silence’ talk of the essential contradiction of the universe as creation and destruction as two opposite sides of energy.
Gopal Lahiri has experimented with forms in his Miscellany section; he writes verses as Gogyoshi, Haiku, Senryu and Haibun with great authenticity. His use of oxymoron (vibrant emptiness), personification of night and day, forests and the trees, rivers and sky are remarkable.
Stamps of maturity are evident in the other three sections: Resurrection, Dreamers Search Green Path, and Mind’s Eye. Solitude in the first section talks of silence (as personified), something that the poet carries along everywhere he goes.
my journey is never solo,
it is filled with solitude
searching for a new mindscape
Indeed, profound with lyricism and beautiful imagery, this remarkable collection of verses will soothe all anguished nerves.
Cover image sourced by the reviewer
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