Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
BOOK REVIEW
Title: Crossing the Shoreline
Author: Gopal Lahiri
Publisher: Haojan Publishers, Kolkata
Year: 2022
Price: Rs. 300/-INR
The anthology of myriad hues finds Gopal Lahiri chafe at the world with his predominant symbolism of words, in a ringing conviction. A soft-spoken poet, his nuanced poems adorn his thoughts and his reaction to the world. His earlier book of poems, Alleys are Filled with Future Alphabets, have a title that fills the poet’s expressive resonance in the lines
we laugh, we cry, we break laws, we are not handcuffed, we are not punished
Deep and incisive in his sensibility, Crossing the Shoreline make darkness a reality of loving and light is the truth when sleep welcomes us in dreams. He finds hump-backed alphabets move like camels amidst the sand-dunes of time. Every undulation amidst the sand-space is metaphorically –
of my own breathing every location is in walking distance
Lahiri’s thoughts are not inchoate amidst the irregular verse-patterns of his deep and concise thoughts. He and his readers like the “step-children of the morning” find in a naked-heart a “tiny thought” that keeps pace with his dreams. His imagery forms a singular-thread of thoughts of alphabets, letters, words, history, stories, syllables, whispers, lyrics, idioms and long-read-stories from the past. This makes his verses form the unified spectrum of his thoughts. Lahiri finds in stories the history of a people as an assurance of past reality where he may say with certainty that what augurs in a distant time is never a lie. Somewhere between our life’s “wreckages and resilience”, he finds salvation. In his poem ‘Stories’, the walls of forts are his silent-scribes.
We find him here as a serious poet as he forms about him a world of myth crisply laid out on the walls, as he steps inside a café. Silence settles all around and we find him burning those old letters that zoom about in his mental horizon in ‘Story Elements’. Within his sensibilities he finds the wind howl and “tiny owls scrawl letters on my pillow” (‘Half-formed Poems’). In his grasp lie a handful of scarred memories as he attempts to make human contact. He does find words, but his solace disappears like Houdini when he figuratively needs them. In him the dearth of human contact becomes a felt need (‘Conversation’).Alphabets are for him promises of human bonding. The seed, expressions and promises are there and yet love in his life has not been a mere act but a spelling out of his thoughts (‘Love Alphabets’). A kerfuffle is always on in his mind’s sphere and he realises that “Not everyone is homebound” Lahiri’s world of poetry is a beautiful world of laughter as he finds orioles and sparrows chirp about and so many verses flower near his bedside (‘Crossing’). He notices all about him – the creeping ivy, the red ants on the earth, the sparrow on the parapet, the veins on our limbs that stand out, a window that opens out to the sky, and the sky that smiles. It is a seeking and a finding (‘Search’). The poet is not at loggerheads with the world, but his search persists (‘StartAgain’) as he chews, writes or decides and his smile does not spread out but becomes a paper-thin-feeling. He labours under the onus of the feeling that he needs to spread that smile from the heart of the dark night sky (‘Whisper’). The past is for him not dead, but a being against whom he nestles in ‘Old Letters’ and merges to breathe in (‘Shoals of Love’) from “the womb of petrichor” his curious semblance of thoughts. It burns the being within him and he states that he is “made of firewood”. The hurts clamour within him
With the light and shadow of some other universe Weave lines and half lines
He states that his stanzas do not flow, they pause by and sulk (‘My Poem’) unwilling to speak out. As a poet he feels this elusiveness:
Near the open door, the alphabets wait like a patient For the touch of my hand
As all the poems snarl with silence in a linear progression, Lahiri’s Crossing the Shoreline turn meaningful as the thoughts take shape within the ‘Inner Cage’ of the mind
a need to dig to conceal my bones. without spores or promises, ready to be wounded in the silence that presses lips until they become a death kiss.
If ageing has been about mere living, the poet finds “guilt and shame” and seeks “redemption” (‘Little Light’) for it. His mind is a vast emptiness where silence reigns. But there is the whisper of a rainbow and the poet says that “Dreams are like mist that thins and disappears in the blue”. The poet who had found a desert vastness and palpable silence concludes by questioning – “How hard it is for the voices to be shut?”
The poet’s blueprints of thoughts is not about life being gauche and defenceless. Life carps at us and in the poem Palette the poet therefore tells us how the colours of life permit the clock of life on the wall to keep record. People are there in our lives. They leave and we cannot hold them back. What greater grief than this do we face? We can only miss the people we love (‘Each Absence’).
Sentences are losing grammar now, words small letters Love dies slowly on the blank page.
Lahiri’s 14 Liners undergo the novelty of seeking and finding the old once again within his ancient being, in respectful cohabitation –
Old city searching Ancient lights
As he nurses the imagery of folding and storing time and memories with expectations, he finds within him a hand opening out to another in distress (‘Folded Times’). What is he to do? His coffee turns cold, his cigarette burns to ashes and streets are quieted (‘Transitory Moments’) and he questions himself. Is man really free? “Freedom is still a revolving truth” (Traverse). It all comes rushing back to him with the picture of his grandpa on a wheelchair, all those loving childhood conversations and the dark hours of the night shunting between freedom and promise trapped amidst ‘Those Maybe’. A cry reaches deep within him; a cry wrapped in philosophical ruminations in beautiful haiku and senryu, and haibun, of human frailty and natural emotional responses, in their vivid forms.
Oh, what a journey is life as we dwell on Crossing the Shoreline as the shadows lengthen and the walls of solitude builds up between the time interval that we call life. Gopal Lahiri makes us aware about how illusions fade and die within us. What honestly remains is but the reality of our verses standing wistfully in sympathy with life on the shore, waiting to cross.
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
Navamalati Neog Chakraborty has served as a professor of English in Colleges at Kohima, Dimapur and Guwahati. She served as a guest professor at Calcutta University in the Comparative Literature Department. She has translated works of the stalwarts of Assamese Literature – biographies, dramas and novels. She has several anthologies to her name- in English and in Assamese. Navamalati Neog Chakraborty is a bilingual poet, translator, critic and short story writer.